The oak weighs in
Muscle & Fitness, March, 2005 by Arnold Schwarzenegger
IN ALL MY YEARS AS A BODY-builder, and even today, there's one question that people just keep asking: "What should I do between sets?" They want to know how long they should rest and what to do, if anything, while resting. Many trainers, bodybuilders and other experts have weighed in on this topic, and now it's my turn. Here's what I suggest.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
As with many other things in life, you need to find a happy medium when it comes to the length of your rest periods between sets. If you don't rest long enough, your muscles won't have recovered properly and your strength will suffer. If you rest too long, though, like five minutes, your heart slows down, you lose your pump, your muscles get cold and your intensity diminishes as a result.
I've always felt that for bodybuilders, rest periods between sets of the same exercise should be limited to around one minute, maybe even slightly less, depending on the muscle group you're training--large muscle groups take longer to recover than small ones. After one minute, your body has mostly recovered. After around three minutes, it has recovered as much as it can without extended rest. Unless you're a competitive powerlifter, you don't want this. Within a workout, you need to overload your muscles by continually working them when they're not quite rested completely. This helps to boost growth-hormone levels, which leads to more growth.
SPEND YOUR TIME WISELY
Okay, so you're resting roughly one minute. What do you do in that minute? Stand there looking at yourself in mirror? Socialize? Of course not. Your rest periods are as much a part of the workout as the actual sets and reps themselves, and they deserve equal attention.
I used to employ isotension between sets of the same exercise. All this entails is contracting (flexing) the muscles you're training as a bodybuilder might do when posing onstage. If you're working chest, flex your pecs for about 10-20 seconds. Alternately, you can stretch the muscle between sets. Besides helping you to develop larger muscles, isotension also enables you to practice better control of individual muscles, which can help you isolate certain bodyparts in future training sessions.
You can also try a technique I call staggered sets to help bring up a weak bodypart. Staggered sets involve performing a number of sets for a bodypart you want to increase intensity on while a different muscle group is recovering between sets. For example, when I decided my calves needed extra work, I would do a few sets of calf raises, then move to bench presses, then do more sets for calves, then go back to my chest with incline presses and so on. It may have been chest day, but by the end of the workout I'd done 20-plus sets for a relatively weak bodypart. Eventually, my calves were no longer a weakness.
BY GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, MR. OLYMPIA 1970-75, '80
