Building muscle is freaking hard. Like, absurdly hard. It takes years and years of time spent toiling away under a bar with increasingly heavier weights that could very well crush you or cause serious bodily harm.
And yet so many of us keep pushing to build more and more size. Understandably so, we all want to look like fucking superhero’s, and building muscle is the easiest way to make that happen since science hasn’t stopped dicking around and figured out a way for us to fly or become invisible yet.
By far and away one of the most frustrating things about building muscle is that after a certain point what used to work for you won’t work any longer. Which means you’ve got to change things up and go with a more advanced approach.
Enter rest pause sets.
In the lexicon of bodybuilding tricks rest pause sets seem to be one of the more commonly overlooked training tricks, with trainee’s opting for things like drop sets instead.
And while I love some drop sets, if you haven’t given rest pause sets a try, you’re seriously missing out.
What is a rest pause set?
At it’s most basic level a rest pause set is basically taking a set of a specific exercise to near failure, stopping for 10-15 seconds, and then continuing to get as many reps as possible.
The beauty is in the simplicity of the set, right alongside the torture. Because if you haven’t ever put yourself through a grueling set of something like shoulder press, rested 10-15 seconds, and went right back at it, you haven’t truly lived.
Why do rest pause sets work so well for growth?
When it comes to building size accumulating as much fatigue as possible in the muscle fibers is the name of the game. This is typically why so many growth programs have so much volume compared to a program designed to build pure strength.
You need to adequately damage the muscle fibers to elicit a response and subsequent adaptation. Or put another way, build some fucking muscle.
Rest-pause sets are perfect for this because that brief pause allows you to clear out some of the metabolites and waste products from the muscle tissue that begin to accumulate, but the rest isn’t long enough to fully recover.
As a result, you wind up causing more overall damage and causing more metabolites and gainz inducing waste by products to build up in the tissue. Which means more gainz.
How to incorporate rest pause sets.
- Pick a weight that is about 70-80% of your max on a given exercise (you can do these with nearly any movement.)
- Rep out until near failure
- Rest 10-15 seconds, and then continue repping out until actual failure
- Rest about 90 seconds and then repeat for another 2-3 sets
Speaking of getting jacked. This will also do it. LOL.