StrengthCast: Mind and Muscle Monday - The Importance of Rest Periods
- Menachem Brodie
- Dec 22, 2025
- 2 min read
Every Monday, our strength leaders Menachem Brodie and Lori Thomson will guide you through focused lessons designed to support your strength journey in BaseCamp. These short sessions break down key concepts, teach you how to move well, and help you understand how strength work fits into your overall training. The goals are simple: Build confident movement. Build durable performance. Build the habits that let your riding improve week after week. Settle in and learn from two of the best as they walk with you through each step of the process.
This week we look at the importance of Rest Periods.
While we are all familiar with the importance of choosing exercises for improving our strength and movement for cycling, what many may not realize, is that if you have the wrong rest periods, you can be undermining your hard work!
Rest periods are much akin to setting the oven temperature for baking:
Too hot, and you'll overcook yourself
Too cold, and you'll miss some of the adaptations you want and need from your strength training.
If we are looking to stress the Aerobic System, your rest will be short (90 seconds or less)- This rest period allows the work to be mostly limited by your ability to deliver oxygen to the working muscles, and the ability of your Type 1 (slow and steady) muscles to keep working.
If we are looking to build some muscle that will help move you along the road better, the rest period needs to be 2-5 minutes between sets, as we need the nervous system to more fully recover so that it can fire harder.
And if we are looking for explosiveness or true power? Well, those rest periods need to be 3-6 minutes.
As we move forward in the BaseCamp Strength programs, be sure to keep an eye out for specific rest intervals- both between exercises in a Superset, as well as between Supersets themselves.
No rest prescribed?
A good rule of thumb is 60-90 seconds.
These details can really help drive far better performance based results for your cycling from your strength training.
Thank you, that is useful to understand.