Wait for Me! Why Men Need Longer Rest Periods Between Sets

At the start of the year, many individuals and couples renew their commitment to fitness and wellness. Maybe you and your loved one have done it before, or plan to! Sometimes, couples start a new fitness class or program together to improve their health and hold each other accountable. Early on, a pattern emerges: a couple starts a resistance training workout, and the first few sets go well. The husband notices his wife is ready for the next set, while he still feels winded. His first thought is, "she's not lifting heavy enough." His second thought is, "what's wrong with me?" The wife, similarly, notices she's ready for the next set and recognizes the look on her husband's face that says he's not 100% himself. She thinks, "he's not as fit as I thought," along with all the implications that come with it.

The truth is, both the husband and wife are performing within their normal expectations. During resistance training, men require longer rest periods between sets. Scientists have observed this for the past two decades and now understand why this difference exists.

It helps to look at the woman's body as the baseline. Women can sometimes rest as little as 30 seconds between sets, averaging between 30 and 90 seconds before they feel fully prepared for their next resistance training set. A woman's muscle fibers, hormones, and cardiorespiratory system help her recover in about 90 seconds or less. By comparison, a man's body has a higher proportion of Type II muscle fibers, which create more metabolic demands. A woman's higher proportion of Type I muscle fibers allows her to complete a set of exercises without the same metabolic demand. Relative to their overall mass, men have less estrogen in their bodies. Estrogen has muscle-protective properties, reducing damage and inflammation to the muscle fibers. Estrogen also enhances blood flow, delivering oxygen and nutrients to muscles more effectively, which accelerates their recovery between sets. Men's bodies do not have the same density of capillaries near their muscles compared to women, which inhibits their ability to clear out metabolic byproducts and lactate build-up. Finally, because men tend to lift heavier loads relative to their overall mass, there is greater demand on the neuromuscular system and greater use of phosphocreatine, both of which require time to reload, alongside the replenishment of glycogen stores and ATP within the muscle cells.

So, take the rest period that works best for YOU. If your partner is ready to go and you aren't, let them go ahead. They can also wait for you if you'd like to stay in sync throughout the workout session. Women should aim for a 90-second break (or less) between sets, while men should aim for a 2 to 3-minute break for optimal recovery. If you're working with a personal trainer or going to a fitness class, your coach is trained to respond to your needs and tweak the timing of the workout accordingly. And if you do need more time, ask for it!

Celebrate the differences!

Failing is the best way to transform your body? Yes, it is!

Exercising can sometimes seem a little confusing. There are so many options, so many philosophies, and so many contradictions out there that it can sometimes lead to to not want to exercise at all, for fear of doing it wrong. The one thing that always seems straight forward when you're doing an exercise program, and typically the first thing people think about when their trainer tells them to do a certain movement, is how many reps are you supposed to do.

Typically, you'll look at a program designed to transform your body, and you'll see something like 4 sets, for 8 repetitions. Or, it might say 4 sets for 16 repetitions. Most people will feel like they at least understand that fundamental part of the exercise programming. Unfortunately, this is untrue. If your goal is to transform your body in some way, whether your goal is fat loss, putting on lean muscle, or bulking, your objective is to force your muscles to endure a new stimulus, or a novel stimulus. That happens by pushing your muscle to the limits of its current capabilities, so that it grows and adjusts to the new demands that you're placing on it.

With that premise in mind, aiming to complete 4 sets for 8 repetitions is not actually the goal. You want to FAIL while striving to achieve 8 repetitions. This can easily be the most difficult part of body transformation and resistance training to understand. There is no benefit in lifting a weight that you can comfortably lift for 8 repetitions, and then putting the weight down. If your programming is for 8 repetitions, you must select a weight that makes you FAIL at or near 8 repetitions. You should be on the 6th repetition, and your muscles should say "we don't have 2 more reps!" But, more often than not, when people see their rep ranges and goals, they grab a dumbbell or a weight that they know they can comfortably lift, and then lift it. Your workout program is not an achievement checklist-- look at it as a failure checklist. You gain significantly more muscle and reach your goals sooner by failing at or near that 8th rep. There are no gold stars for finishing 8 reps when your muscles could have done significantly more work!

If this were a race, imagine yourself nearing full exhaustion as the finish line is within sight. Achievement would look like you running through that finish line tape, chest high, still going at your race pace. That is not what we want when we're transforming your body through resistance training. Rather, you want to see that finish line in sight, and then stumble just 4 steps shy of the finish line! You catch your breath, gather yourself, stand up and grit yourself through those final four steps as you cross the finish line in last place. THAT is what you're looking for as you complete a set.

Are you familiar with that metaphor for life, the one stating that we learn more from our failures than from our successes? That is exactly what your muscles do, and building that lean muscle is will accelerates your metabolism and allows you to burn more fat, helping you achieve your body composition goals! You are far more "successful" from a body transformation standpoint if you only get 9 out of those 12 reps on the first attempt, and then catch your breath for 10 seconds to get those final 3 reps. If you see yourself approaching that programmed final rep and know that you're about to cross the finish line with your chest nice and high, be sure to select a heavier weight for your next set. What that tells us is that you're stronger than you thought!

Reach your body composition goals-- fail consistently! Once you learn how to fail, you will consistently succeed.

The Debate: Is Being Fat a Choice?

This debate started popping up in my social media and news feeds a few months ago, and it surprised me: Is being overweight a choice? There were at least five longform videos and a handful of articles floating around about this topic, and I consumed each one. The common threads among them were that there was very little science, but the opinions of a mixed panel of fitness professionals and enthusiasts alongside body positivity advocates and individuals who struggled with obesity.

Overwhelmingly, the majority of the individuals on these panels felt that being overweight was a deliberate choice. The fitness-minded individuals tended to focus on the axiom of "calories in, calories out" as their irrefutable evidence (in their minds), while some of the body positivity advocates similarly shared anecdotes about times when they did manage to lose weight, and cited those short-term successes as evidence that their obesity must be entirely their choice. This does tend to match my own experiences when I hear people talk about their struggles with weight gain. They tend to cite poor willpower and personal failure when we talk about this topic.

Well, the science does not match up to any of these opinions. Multiple studies show us that the single greatest factor that determines whether someone will be obese is their genetics. The next largest factor was the body composition of the person's parents AT THE TIME OF CONCEPTION. What that means that if an individual was conceived by obese parents, they were significantly more likely to be overweight as a child, all the way into adulthood. Finally, multiple studies over the past 30 years have disproven the adages of willpower being the determining factor for weight loss, and that if you're failing it's because you must lack willpower. Previous and current environment, metabolism, gut microbiome, and the cognitive processing of things like hunger cues are all much greater factors for why our bodies look the way that they do, despite our diet and exercise attempts.

In a lot of ways, part of your destiny was determined by your parents. They aren't the villains of your story by any means; they did their best, and usually repeated what they were exposed to or what was socially acceptable when they raised you. Unless they force-fed you like human foie gras, we cannot blame them for having any sort of malicious intent for how we turned out. The education and information simply was not there! Compare it to parents with kids in school today. Those kids are learning "common core" mathematics principles that their parents never learned. How is the parent expected to automatically reinforce those common core principles if they weren't taught those principles in the first place? The same thing applies to food science and exercise science for wellness and fitness. I can distinctly remember a time in the late 90s, watching the evening news, when a news anchor said that eggs were bad for us one night, and then said eggs were good for us the following night! Several foods were demonized one week and exalted the next week, depending on who was paying for the "research".

That being said, our circumstances are one thing. Our deliberate decisions are another thing. While we aren't always fully responsible for our current circumstances, to include how we were raised and how prepared we were for life when we left home, we can choose to take control of our future. We can educate ourselves on the most effective ways to reach our goals. We can seek expert assistance and guidance, helping us to stay accountable to ourselves. Most of all, we can engage with one another from a place of empathy and not judge someone for their circumstances. You never know their whole story!

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