How long should First Responders and Tactical Populations rest between sets?
Key Takeaway
Tactical populations and First Responders are often inundated with workout programs that have limited rest periods between sets, reps, or rounds. With the constant pressure of being in a “tough” profession, rest periods are sometimes viewed as some form of weakness. The reality is proper rest periods are extremely important to illicit the adaptations most trainees seek. This is particularly true for strength, power, and speed work.
This article will discuss this topic from the perspective of a strength training session. Future articles will focus more on conditioning or other goals.
Strength Work- 2-3 Minutes
When training for strength tactical and first responder populations should be resting 2-3 minutes between their heavier work sets. You can rest for shorter periods during warm ups, but once you start creeping up to around 70%+ of someones one rep max (heaviest weight you can lift for one rep) you should allow yourself a 2-3 minute rest period.
Why? Because even though you feel rested or you aren’t out of breath you need to give your central nervous system time to recover. You are also allowing your creatine phosphate system, or the energy system of the human body that is primarily responsible for short bursts of high intensity efforts to replenish itself. Most studies show this take anywhere between 2-3 minutes. Pure strength athletes will sometimes even rest longer.
It is important to understand strength work isn’t necessarily about building fatigue in the sense of “burning” muscles and/or being out of breath. Of course, as you become more trained you can rest closer to the 2 minute mark if you still feel like your performance hasn’t dropped, or if density is more of a goal for the session, but generally speaking you should be recovered between sets.
Hypertrophy/Assistance Work 1-2 Minutes
Once you’re past your main movements and you’ve hopefully moved some heavy weight, you now you can shorten up your rest periods. Accessory/Assistance work is typically the portion of the session where you’re looking to build muscle, strengthen tendons, or any other gap in your training that you need to train. I still wouldn’t shorten this up too much because if you build too much fatigue you won’t be able to lift much weight.
Circuits 30-60 Seconds
If you are short on time in your strength training session, this is where doing your accessory work as a circuit can be valuable. As an example lets say you chose 3 movements and you decided to rest about 30-60 seconds between each exercises. What makes this useful is that you’ll effectively rest about 1.5-3 minutes between each specific movement. If your aerobic conditioning can handle it, this is a great way to get in quality work in a time efficient manner without sacrificing performance.
Example for Upper Body Accessory:
DB Press 3 x 5
Rest 1 Minute
Pull Up- 3 x 8
Rest 1 Minute
Landmine Rotation- 3 x 5 each direction
Rest 1 minute
Repeat
In this case if you rested 1 minute between each exercise, you would get a full 3 minutes of rest between each exercise before doing another set. Of course it isn’t passive rest, but you will still give the working muscles/movement patterns a small break that depending on your general fitness you can still keep performance high. You’ll also get your heart rate up a bit to probably in your high aerobic zone (again, depending on fitness) which although isn’t a perfect conditioning tool will still have some impact.
Closing
You’re not being weak by giving yourself an opportunity to recover between sets on dedicated strength days. In fact, you’re being intelligent about your training and will gain strength faster. Everything in your training should have a purpose, and using rest periods strategically will only enhance your strength gains.
There is a time where you can shorten periods depending on your goals. We will talk about that in our next article.
Questions? Please reach out or comment below. You can also hop on our programming to see how this looks in action with a 7-day free trial.
