The Rest-Pause Technique
The rest-pause technique is a great way to increase the work done during a training session and to push your body to its limit.
It does this mainly through increasing time under tension and prolonging the length of a set.
It does however require a lot of mental toughness and hard work and shouldn’t be confused with a drop set.
So how do you use this effective muscle building technique work?
With the rest-pause technique you take a very short 10-15 second break following a set before trying your best to squeeze out a few more repetitions.
Drop sets involve you taking a similar 10-15 second break. Then you would lower the weight by 10% before performing more repetitions.
But with the rest-pause technique you use the same weight. For this reason, more repetitions are performed with a higher intensity when the rest-pause technique is used in comparison to dropping sets.
On both the rest-pause method and drop sets the10-15 second break is just enough of a break to clear a tiny bit of lactate, resynthesizes a small bit of ATP (energy), and builds up a small bit of will/effort to squeeze out some more reps.
The key to a successful rest-pause set is weight selection.
If the exercise asks for 8-10 repetitions it’s critical that you fatigue during this 8-10 rep window.
You then take the 10-15 seconds rest and should be able to achieve 1-5 more reps depending on the exercise, your training age, and the load you’re utilizing.
The rest-pause technique is very taxing, so I recommend with beginners to only use it on isolation based exercises and on minimal sets with their first exposure to this technique.
As you get more advanced you can use the technique on bigger exercises which will be more metabolically demanding and require a greater stress response to the Central Nervous System.
If you’re short on time the rest-pause method is a great way to condense the volume of 4-5 sets into 2-3 sets.
Give this technique a go and feel your muscles fatigue like never before.
