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Comment by virtue3 | Hacker News Reader

The 1-3 minutes comes from a lot of places.

I find it -really- amusing that people forget that weightlifting is an olympic sport. There have been -plenty- of studies on it. The main issue tends to be that the russian protocols don't necessarily work for 'natural' athletes.

Shorter rest periods are used for conditioning, not muscle growth.

You can be a lazy slob and wait 3-5 minutes between each set. But you'll be at the gym forever.

What these studies always completely fail to grasp is:

If I have 2hrs to do my workout, and I take 5 minutes between sets, how much work am I going to do? What if I just took 1 minute between sets?

What if it's close to competition time? Do I want to be huffing and puffing on stage? can I waste time with cardio or should I cut rest time down between sets?

There's a lot of variables and not all of them are equating to optimal muscle growth.

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If you focus on the big three - squats, deads, and bench press - and you only do one of those per day at the gym, then it only takes an hour total. Time under load is about 20 minutes, and the rest is rest.

I read books or even take my laptop if it’s quiet enough to work (pre COVID).

Of course they say you should do nothing in breaks except think about your without, but that is only for the special people who are absolutely committed (and obsessed).

Those long breaks allow you to regain a lot of capacity and enable bigger increases up to the pinnacle in the last set where you set your new 1RM or come close.

> If you focus on the big three - squats, deads, and bench press - and you only do one of those per day at the gym,

This describes basically no modern or historical bodybuilding programming.

Google "the big three weight lifting" to find lots of modern guidance which suggests those as the primary exercises to build overall strenght.

I'd recommend you Google "Dunning-Kruger curve".

I’ve found flash card apps are really good for long rests. Doesn’t suck your attention out of the room like email/news/social/texting, but easier to pick up and put down than a book. I also guess there’s a benefit to learning in that state.

My own key variable, as it turns out, is "time between deciding to lift and grasping weight". Which means that keeping an adjustable dumbbell by my bed and using it a few times a week is close to optimal. While having the gym is nice for the additional equipment, this plan means that I don't have to think about making time for the gym since I can just do some more around bedtime or wakeup. Load, reps and sets are far less important than the factor of being able to add more volume whenever I want.

And that does reflect lifestyle goals - I am not going for a competition physique, and the gym isn't my social club. I am just aiming for a little bit of progress year over year, and scientifically optimal muscle growth would actually get in the way of other plans. I was in the habit of tracking it all pre-pandemic, but now I just do Ali counts - "I only start counting when it starts hurting."

You could pair exercises to save some time.

See RRR: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...

I've wondered whether you could spend the rest time for one muscle group by doing an exercise for a different muscle group. Is that a no-no, or is it not done for practical reasons (the logistics of jumping back and forth between machines)?

It's possible, and very effective if you want to save time, but it comes at a (very slight) hit to actual muscle growth, since it's likely you'll end up limited by your cardio as opposed to the muscles themselves. If your goal is to build muscle, a set brought to failure by anything other than the target muscle is ineffective.

You're describing supersets.

Remember that it’s your brain driving the coordinated electrical signals (and maintaining steadily increasing strength of those signals) which makes the muscles do the work.

Your brain needs recovery time.

This seems sarcastic or wildly inaccurate.

To clarify, two things.

The brain does not directly drive the muscles. It does not have copper running to them, providing a charge. Instead, cell after cell transmits the signal, from brain to muscle, each cell providing its own charge. The brain expends more energy thinking about abstract ideas, than telling a muscle to move.

Second thing, healthy, fit people run for hours, bike for hours, without issue. As a teenager, I'd work on a farm for 10 hours, picking fruit, throwing bales of hay, digging, on and on without tire.

Yet just continually walking, uses more "brain telling muscles what to do", than any single heavy lift plus even perhaps 10 seconds of break.

Realistically, writing cursive with a pen, typing fast, should use as much brain energy, for fine, detailed control requires many different muscles all being used at once, hence more signaling.

It's not really, central nervous system exhaustion needs to be managed with strength training. And it takes quite a bit of concentration to lift properly, a short mental break is really useful.

I added more details while you were writing this I think.

Your nerves don't care how heavy something is. Fine muscle control is just as intensive as anything to the nerves. Talking uses waaaay more nerve and muscle control than lifting heavy weight.

Breaks are required so that the blood can carry away waste, and replenish glucose and oxygen. That's all.

The point is that the brain is the essential point of initiation of muscle movement, and it is an essential part of the sensory feedback loop which then leads to muscular adjustments.

The ability to focus without fail is not unlimited. When you're holding more than your bodyweight on your shoulders, the demands to simply maintain balance are significant. This means a lot more than just muscles holding a static position. If you are not very focused on the sensations which indicate a change in balance somewhere, you will lose form and possibly hurt yourself.

Whatever the mechanism within the brain, the breaks are also necessary there. Of course the muscles need recovery time, but the brain does also.

I'm someone who's been seriously active in powerlifting for years and I was getting ready to argue, but you seem to be correct. Not only was I not able to find research supporting CNS fatigue, Menno Henselmans himself(quoted in the article) agrees https://mennohenselmans.com/cns-fatigue/.

What I have anecdotally observed is that regularly lifting closely to your maximum (particularly at higher levels) will inevitably lead to accumulated fatigue. Whatever the root cause of that fatigue is (whether muscoskeletal, endocrine or nervous) is a factor that does lead to degraded performance over time.

The literature is lacking in longer-term studies, so I'm curious to see whether my anecdotal experience is pure confirmation bias or there is a mechanism behind it.

I don't think it seems to be that clear cut, but the consensus does seem to show it's not a huge driver. More anecdotally though, to my original point, I really do need some brain rest in addition to just muscle fatigue between hard lifts.

Fine motor skills are, afaik, controlled by different networks than gross motor skills. They develop at different times in the brains. I don't think they can be that directly compared. Besides, I do like to take a break if I'm typing or writing a lot :)

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