Aloha my friends, and Happy Fitness-Tip Friday!
I recently came across a fascinating study that will be of particular interest for anybody interested in optimizing STRENGTH gains with their training!
In a previous FTF tip (if you’re an All-Access Member see “How Much Weight Should You Use??” from Week 36) I went over in detail the well-researched fact that the ideal number of reps you should perform is different if your goal is to maximize HYPERTROPHY (aka size) from what it is if your goal is to maximize STRENGTH.
I’ve also known and taught for years that your between-SET rest times should be longer if your goal is strength than if it’s hypertrophy.
What I did NOT know until coming across this recent study is that the long rest time principle appears to also apply to between every single REP within those sets!!
Researchers randomly separated participants into two groups. They all performed 7 weeks of a bench press routine consisting of 4 sets of 6 reps, twice a week… but one group used the “traditional” method of no rest in-between reps in a set, while the other group inserted 20 SECOND rests (fully unloaded rests) between EVERY rep!
At the beginning and end of the 7 weeks they measured their max bench strength via the machine in the image below:
Figure 1) Zaras et. al. DOI: 10.2478/hukin-2022-0016
Incredibly, they found that those who employed the 20-second inter-rep rest technique achieved an average increase in strength that was 60% HIGHER than the traditional rep group!!! (21.5% increase vs 13.5%)
They also found that “upper body isometric peak force” was increased ONLY in the 20-second rest group! (Note that max strength and isometric peak force aren’t the same thing… but I won’t dive into the difference here).
They reported that the amount of triceps hypertrophy was statistically the same between both groups in this case… but plenty of other studies have shown that relatively shorter rest times (at least between-set rest times) are best for optimizing hypertrophy.
In the end, I’d like to see this principle and effect repeated in multiple additional studies by different research teams before I’m 100% convinced… but the results of this well-designed and executed study are extremely compelling. We’re not talking about a 5% – 10% increase here that could easily be explained by confounding factors… but 60%!! That’s convincing enough for me to recommend that – if your primary goal is strength gains – start working this inter-rep rest technique here and there in your training!! I’ll definitely be integrating it into the future “Strength Series” versions of all my programs 
Application: Start integrating some between-REP rests if you want to maximize STRENGTH gains!!
Dr. Gains 
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