Are you giving yourself enough rest at the gym?
The term recovery can have different meanings depending on the situation.
When exercising, recovery can mean the steps an athlete or exerciser can take to replenish energy stores and rebuild their muscular and nervous systems before the next game, practice or training session, or it can mean the rest period that occurs between bouts of high intensity exercise (between sets) that allows one to sustain a high quality of training. This column will focus on the latter.
When we are exercising we are stimulating many of the interconnected systems in the body in order to perform at high levels of function.
Muscles, nerves and hormones are all recruited to operate, sometimes maximally, for periods of time resulting in fatigue. These systems need a rest period in order to sustain a high level of performance and this is what trains the body to become fitter. The different systems in the body can have different recovery periods and so experiments are done to determine what these optimum periods are.
To date experiments on recovery times for weight training have generally shown that two to three minutes are required for multi-joint (knees and hip or elbow and shoulder combined) exercises and for single joint exercises, one to two minutes is recommended.
Recent studies have shed some new light on the subject. Previously it was assumed that rest periods of no more than 90 seconds promoted the greatest amount of muscle growth (hypertrophy). But recent research is showing that shorter rest periods also decrease the amount of total training volume (sets, reps and weight) that can be done.
Comparisons between a one-and five-minute rest period between sets showed that the longer rest period allowed more training volume and greater muscle gains. This may be due to factors such as fuel replenishment and nervous system recovery.
Creatine phosphate (CP) is the primary fuel for exercise that lasts 10-20 seconds, which is the duration of most weight lifting or sprinting drills. Following an all-out sprint or lift effort it takes 10 seconds to replenish 55 per cent of CP stores, 30 seconds to replenish 70 per cent and three minutes to replenish 90 per cent of CP stores. This is often why performance decreases if short rest periods are too short. Another factor is nervous system fatigue.
What comes as a surprise to many is the fact that the nervous system gets fatigued and needs sufficient recovery time. In fact sports training that is focussed on components such as foot speed, quickness and agility, rest periods are often woefully inadequate and contribute to the athlete becoming slower, not faster. This is because if sufficient rest time is not given between sets of drills, the subsequent sets will be done slower and with less coordination and precision. The end result is that the athlete learns and reinforces slower and poorer technique and agility. Too often these drills are done more like a moderate intensity cardiovascular drill. The proper way to do these exercises is explosively at high intensity with lots of rest in between.
The recommended recovery time in quickness and agility drills is 10 seconds of rest for every one second of work. That means that if the drill lasts five seconds, you should rest for 50 seconds. The same goes for plyometric jumping drills since these tax the nervous system maximally as well. These rest periods can seem quite long during a training session, but that’s only because athletes are often not used to giving adequate recovery time.
In our hurry-up-lives, we want to finish our exercise sessions to get on to the next activity of the day – do more in less time. But by cutting down on recovery time we may be getting poorer results and therefore wasting our time.
– Kerry Senchyna is the founder, owner and president of West Coast Kinesiology since 1992 and is a provincially registered kinesiologist.
