How Many Reps Should I Do?And How Long Should I Rest For?

From Coach Lizzie

So todays article came off the back of a conversation I had with a lady in the gym last week. I was actually performing some hip thrusts with a decent amount of weight (not to brag!)as part of my lower body day and she came up to me in my rest. She lead with the question,

‘Can I just ask, how long did it take for you to achieve that!’

Now really her question was how long would it take for HER to achieve it, to which I explained, having never met this lady before, that it completely depends on your experience, how strong you currently are, how many times a week you can train etc.

We then ended up in a conversation with maaaaany other questions as she clearly wanted to make progress in the gym and was also frustrated that she wasn’t!

These included;

Should I rest between sets?

How long should I rest for?

How many reps and sets should I do?

Should I perform exercise back to back or just do single set exercises?

How many times a week should I be practicing pressups to get better?

These are all great questions but the slightly annoying thing is that the answer to all of them,  is IT DEPENDS!

It depends on multiple important factors but the one I want to focus on today is that it depends on what your goal actually is!

This is a mistake I see many people make when they start going to the gym and its that they don’t actually have a clear or clear enough goal in mind.This therefore means they aren’t really training with the intent of achieving anything. And If you don’t know exactly what to is you’re trying to achieve, this makes progressing a lot more difficult, and answering questions similar to the ones the lady asked me in the gym almost impossible! It was clear from speaking to her that that’s exactly where she was. Not making progress but not very clear on what she wanted to achieve!

Some of you reading this now might start to relate to this. Have you been going to the gym recently because you know it’s good for you to exercise or you feel good afterwards, but you haven’t really got a clear goal in mind or what you want the outcome to be. You might have a general idea, such as to get toned or to get fitter. But again this isn’t that clear, what does this actually mean?! It’s not enough to give your clear direction or shape your training structure.

Do you want to lose 10 KG of body fat? Do you want to build up more muscle on your shoulders? Or do you want to get stronger and perform 10 pressups? Depending on the goal and indeed the individual, each would require that your train differently, do different amounts of weight or of cardio , do more or less sessions per week, do different orders of exercises and eat differently( to name but a few things!).

So lets take it back to the lady in the gym and use one of her questions as an example.

How long should I rest between sets?

Well if her goal was to lose 10KG then we might suggest a slightly lower rest time for weight training to keep her heart rate up, burn off more energy and achieve 10-12 reps of weighted exercises. Around 90 seconds would allow for this. This would help build up a little muscle which would increase her metabolic and help create a deficit if teamed with the right nutrition.

However if she wanted to work on building up strength then we would probably look for her body to be completely recovered between sets and have more like 3 mins of rest. This way she could perform lower reps but harder work through heavier and more demanding sets which is what improving her strength would require. So different advice for different goals.

Hopefully you can see my point!

Many fitness related questions can and should be answered with it depends, because it really does! One of the biggest things to consider however is your exact goal and what you want to achieve as that will help give you a lot more direction and shape to your training, including how many reps, and sets you should be doing and the rest times you should be taking!

So I want you to ask yourselves these things;

WHY are you going to the gym?

WHAT is it exactly you want to achieve and then lastly?

And

Is your current training and nutrition set up to help you to achieve this?

If you get clear on this, putting the specifics in place to help you achieve this becomes a lot easier. It will also allow coaches like me or indeed yourself to answer questions like, how many reps and sets should I be doing!

I hope you have a great week,

Lizzie

The One Percent Club