TRY AS YOU might, you can’t pump out reps forever when you’re working toward building bigger muscles. Eventually, you‘ll be too fatigued to complete another rep with good form, a point referred to as “technical failure.” Pushing beyond your last good rep can lead to sloppy lifting mechanics, which can compromise your results or, worse increase your risk of injury. If you find yourself stuck lifting the same weight for the same reps, it may be time to get creative with how you push past that iron hurdle.
One way to head off the siren song of ego lifting is by implementing a planned rest-pause set. It’s an intense lifting technique that requires focus and intention, and as effective as it can be, it shouldn’t be done for every set or even every exercise. By briefly resting after reaching failure, you can squeeze out a few more quality reps using the same weight.
A few extra reps might not seem like a big deal, but they can add up over time, giving your muscles an extra dose of the tension that drives growth. To do a rest-pause set, you’ll take an exercise to the point where you can’t complete another rep with good form. You’ll then rest for five to 15 seconds—in one MH workout plan, fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. recommends taking “three deep breaths” for a pause—then squeeze out a few more reps (expect to be able to do two to four) using the same weight.
You can repeat this process, though one additional round of reps is a good starting point. If you rest longer than 20 seconds, Alexander Rothstein, an exercise physiologist and program coordinator of exercise science at the New York Institute of Technology, says you’re starting to approach a standard rest interval. "If you give yourself that brief moment to… recover, and then you continue the set, you haven't flushed away all of the waste products, and you haven't fully recovered your energy stores, but you are still capable of doing a few more high-quality reps,” he explains.
The purpose of a rest-pause set is to push your muscle to complete a few more hard (but high-quality) reps. If you’re aiming to build muscle, it’s those hard reps near the end of a set that are key; a rest-pause set allows you to sneak in a few more of those reps. While lifters of any experience level can perform rest-pause sets, they’re especially useful for advanced lifters who’ve already cashed in their newbie gains and find it increasingly difficult to progress their lifts and add muscle.
Say you’re doing the dumbbell bench press, an exercise on which you’ve been stuck using the same 50-pound dumbbells for sets of 8 to 10 reps for over a month. You get to that 10th rep and, once again, can’t muster another. Instead of calling it this time, you’ll sit up, rest the dumbbells on your thighs for 15 seconds, and then bust out another two reps.
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