Resting enough for max power

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Today on Dad Strength

• Get your rest period right

• Transitioning into fatherhood

• The ugly side of skill development

• An article, a quote, a dad joke

Get your rest period right

Getting your rest period right isn’t just a question of time efficiency. It also helps ensure that you’re setting yourself up for success in the next set. So, how do you do it?

Once upon a time (as in 20 years ago), the evidence skewed a little longer than it does now. Maximum power and strength still require more rest than most people expect — maybe 3-5 minutes. Rest periods for general strength are a bit more fluid — generally 30-90 seconds. And rest periods for muscle gain are even more variable — as little as 20 seconds. These ranges provide a (literally) educated guess on where to start for yourself. They’re a great ballpark. The next step is to further tailor things to fit.

One framework I’ll use to organize rest periods is by asking whether an exercise is fatigue–resistant or fatigue-sensitive. Endurance is in the former camp. Not only can endurance exercises hold up under fatigue, your best bet is to begin them after you’re already fatigued. That’s why endurance work lives so happily in the second half of a training session.

Max power is a different deal. It is highly susceptible to fatigue. So much so that you’ll want to be fresh when you begin. Your power output will also slow down well in advance of any clear feelings of fatigue. So, it helps to have some kind of external metric to refer to — whether it’s bar speed or jump height. This is something that probably won’t go over 12 reps and may go as low as 5. However, your next set doesn’t begin when you feel ready; it begins when you can match or exceed the performance of the last set. And if you can’t? Move on.

Max strength is roughly in the above zone but you can gut through it slightly more. Especially since your movement speed is so much slower (maybe 0.4 metres/second). The flip side is that you can’t just slip another “let’s find out” rep into your set. That’s not only because of how long each rep takes, it’s also because of the huge cost of “one too many.”

General strength, endurance, and muscle-building give you far more room to play. So, if you have a default rest time that you always use, it may be worth adding or subtracting 30 seconds to see what happens.

One of my favourite approaches to squeeze more juice out of things is to use cluster sets. Here, you might pick a rep range that is 1-2 reps beyond your ability for a given weight. Let’s call it eight reps with a weight you can only manage for six. Do four reps and then wait juuuust long enough to successfully do another four. Better to start with too much and shrink the rest than vice versa.

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Transitioning into fatherhood

On our last call, I asked our dads about the shift in their identity. Sometimes, it’s gradual — drop by drop. Sometimes, there’s a clear and dramatic shift. These transitions can feel dramatic or completely organic.

Like Steph Curry (more on him next week) shooting from just about wherever, dads wind up making it work. But how they get there can vary quite a bit.

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The ugly side of skill development

A quick reminder about skill development: When you move a skill forward in one area, regressions will happen elsewhere.

Let’s say that you’re working on your running technique and have incorporated a new detail. In the early stages, something else will give. Maybe you’ll slow down or it will mess with the timing of some other part of your stride. Or maybe things things will just kind of look ugly for a while. Same deal with your kid.

Be at peace with that.

The first stage of learning means a kind of reorganization that is not alway pretty. However, the focus is on the new skill, not the old skill. Once the new skill begins to become internalized, you can begin to restore previous standards. Here, the skill is stable enough to hold up as other things get shifted around. That’s an important stage of progression… but it comes later.

What I’m reading/listening to:

The Warm Demander’s Manifesto (this references David Yeager’s book, 10-25, which we’ve discussed in part).

“Adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes”

Prolly not reading this one, TBH

X Gon’ Give it to Ya by Carli Oso

A quote

A dad joke

I once opened up an origami business but it folded immediately.

Take care of yourself, man!

Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com

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