Building Muscle & Strength

You don’t get bigger or stronger in the gym. You get bigger and stronger when resting and recovering, especially during sleep.

This can be hard to accept if you really want to lose fat or build muscle. Surely more workouts means more results? Only up to a point. Rest is a necessity for growth.

When you lift weights, or do any resistance training with the right intensity, you create microscopic tears in your muscles. During rest, cells called fibroblasts repair the tissue. So long as your protein and calorie intake is on point, these repairs make you stronger and more resilient. But if you're not eating well or resting enough, you may just be damaging your muscles.

Skipping recovery interferes with tissue repair and can cause inflammation, lactate build up, overuse injuries and over-training. This means resting between sets, resting specific muscle groups between workouts, taking full days off, scheduling deload weeks and optimizing the most powerful recovery tool of all: sleep.

Resting Between Sets

No growth happens during these 2-5 minute bouts, but they let your energy systems replenish so you can safely and effectively work the next set. They also gauge your intensity. Try one full set of 45 reps instead of 3 sets of 15 and you will struggle. A lot. If you don’t struggle, the load is WAY too low to stimulate the stress response that leads to hypertrophy or strength.

You get more fatigued as you work through your sets — the same way a hike or bike ride tires you out by the end, even with rest stops along the way. Regular rest periods help you maintain intensity and volume across the whole workout, instead of burning out after 1-2 exercises.

If you’re training max strength with reps of 1-3 or 1RM’s, you may need to rest up to 5 minutes for your ATP-PC system to fully replenish.

If you’re training for hypertrophy with 8-20 reps, 90 seconds to 2 minutes will probably be adequate rest.

Can you rest too much between sets?

With strength training, it’s less of an issue — slightly longer rests can replenish your ATP-PC system even more. But you don’t want to cool down too much, so this is only true to a point.

With hypertrophy training, maintaining intensity and blood flow to the target areas stimulates greater gains, so stick to your 90 second to 2 minute rest periods.

Rest Days

Some cherish these days; others struggle to skip the gym. The good news: while taking entire days off is advised once or twice a week, the main aim of a rest day is to rest the specific muscles just worked, not the whole body. So you can still train multiple days in a row.

For example, train your lower body on Monday, then your upper body on Tuesday.

Or train your “push” muscles — chest, shoulders and triceps — on Monday, then your “pull” muscles — upper back and biceps — on Tuesday.

The old-school approach, still used by many, is the full “body part split” — one muscle group per day. Chest, shoulders, back, biceps, triceps, legs and glutes…

The pros and cons are constantly debated. Studies suggest splitting volume across two workouts produces better mass gains, probably from extra MPS activation. But if you have the time, enjoy it and get results — carry on!

The key in any program is allowing your muscle groups to have at least 48-72 hours of rest before directly training them again.

Active Recovery

What should you do on days when you’re intentionally not training?

Sit on the couch and avoid all movement? Not at all.

Active recovery is light, low-intensity movement that stimulates blood flow to muscles and aids recovery. Kicking back matters too, but movement is medicine, and we’re designed to be mobile every day. Research shows one hour in the gym can’t off-set the damage of sitting all day. Move as much as you can, get up every hour, take the stairs and change positions often.

But beyond this, you can use days without actual training to…

• Go for walks in nature
• Light cardio in the gym
• Hit a yoga class
• Do some light stretching
• Work on your mobility
• Go swimming
• Ride bikes with family or friends

If your training is especially intense and you have strength or performance goals, be more careful about which muscles you work during active recovery. Just apply the same logic — rest each muscle group 48-72 hours after training — and adjust accordingly.

For example, if you had a big leg day on Friday or Saturday and a competition on Monday, perhaps skip the Sunday bike ride…

Sleep

The ultimate state of rest. While we sleep, our brain sorts the day’s information, neurons rearrange, and our body releases hormones and proteins that repair cells and replenish energy. Muscle repair, tissue growth and protein synthesis are at their most active while we sleep.

Sleep also controls crucial hunger hormones. When you sleep well, ghrelin (which increases appetite) drops. Lack of sleep does the opposite — ghrelin rises while leptin, which suppresses appetite, falls. You can imagine the havoc this plays on any diet, whether you’re building muscle in a surplus or losing body fat.

Yet so often we hunt for supplements to boost gains, focus or mood while surviving on 4-5 hours of bad sleep. Supplements have their place, but nail the basics — diet, training and sleep — first, then see where you need to optimize with pills and powders.

What can you do to help improve your sleep?

1. Build consistent habits around when you sleep, but don’t change too much too soon. If you currently fall asleep at 12.30am, aim for 12.15am. Hold that for 2-3 weeks before trying for 12am — if you feel ready.

2. Pick a realistic wake time you can stick to. If you’re falling asleep in the early hours, don’t set it too early at first — building habits takes time and sleep quantity matters too. Work toward a schedule that allows 7-9 hours a night with consistent sleep and wake times. Ultimately, getting into bed 9 hours before you wake is a great habit.

3. Spend the hour before sleep on a bedtime routine. Ideally, put all tech down and turn the TV off — screens emit blue light that interferes with melatonin production. If that’s not possible, use your phone’s blue light filter, or get blue light blocking glasses.

4. Have fun crafting your routine. What helps you wind down? Stretch? Yoga? Meditate? Hot shower? Read? Set a cut-off time on nights you’re not out socialising — ideally an hour or 90 minutes before sleep — and start your routine then.