Weird rest requirement disparity.

So I've narrowed down the culprit of what's keeping me from being able to push my sets across up on my upper body movements is rest time between sets. The 10 minute experiment on my bench press produced a perfect sets across PR I hadn't been able to generate for a few weeks. Now I might be able to fiddle with this and bring it down a minute or two, but I know 5 or even 6 won't do it, 7 probably won't either. What's strange to me, is that my heavy squat sets require less rest than this, but I'm physically much more drained by them. I'm left sucking wind and cascading sweat for minutes afterwards, but I can get back under there in 5-7 minutes and do it all again. I even sometimes end up getting a bit nauseous after pushing out set 3. I feel nowhere near this beat up after doing heavy bench or press sets, but I seem to require more rest to complete the next set out nonetheless. I wonder, has anyone else encountered this kind of disparity? Is it potentially just because my bench and press are further along in regards to their potential than my squat is, even though the absolute weights are lower? Is there something I should try and change? Should I just work in whatever rest I need and ignore the inconsistency? I was thinking about maybe trying a 10% drop and actually lowering the rest interval a little on the upper body in combination with that, as an experiment on one lift, while just working with the increased rest interval on the other. More experienced folks here could probably predict how that would turn out.

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Originally Posted by CommanderFun

The 10 minute experiment on my bench press produced a perfect sets across PR I hadn't been able to generate for a few weeks. Now I might be able to fiddle with this and bring it down a minute or two, but I know 5 or even 6 won't do it, 7 probably won't either ... I seem to require more rest to complete the next set out nonetheless ... Is there something I should try and change? Should I just work in whatever rest I need and ignore the inconsistency?

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That sounds logical.

More rest it is, then.

I've had a similar experience with rest intervals on upper vs lower body. I started taking creatine a few weeks ago, which has made it easier to do five to six minute intervals for my squats (5x5 volume day) but I still need 6 to 8 for bench. For what it's worth. At the end of LP I was doing 10 minutes between bench and press sets, and 8 for squats.

Okay, so there isn't something weird going on I need to make a fix somewhere to address. Anyways, hope y'all had a good Thanksgiving. I enjoyed mine, and I will probably also enjoy the second one I am having tomorrow.

Interesting. This is different than I usually see, but just underscores the importance of not taking the general rest and warmup guidelines as literal Word Of God Commandments that are obeyed to the letter for the rest of your life, which is something I still see people do all the time. Hell, same with programming. To quite Andy Baker, from Delgadillo's instagram story yesterday:

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Originally Posted by Andy Baker

"Each program in PPST3 is just a model of a certain principle. Try and understand the model (and principle - Wolf) and don't get lost in the minutia of sets/reps/% etc... That stuff is individualized to a degree and can be quite variable depending on age, gender, goals, etc..."

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This is part of the idea I tried to get across in my article here on the subject of rest between sets. I normally see people need more rest between heavy squat sets than upper body, and this is my own experience as well. I often needed 5-6 minutes even between routine squat volume work, 8-10 mins between really hard volume sets. but for upper body, no matter how hard, I begin to cool off if I rest longer than about 7 mins.

But, you're obviously different. And you discovered this by experimenting with the model and principles, and seeing how they work for you, rather than mindlessly sticking to a prescription that works for most based on those principles. Most, but not YOU.

To me, this experimentation using the model and principles, rather than a mindless checklist of prescriptions, is the essence of training and coaching beyond the early intermediate phase. Once weekly progress (or progress within a fairly short and predictable time frame) has been exhausted, this is exactly what you need to do and how you learn the things you need to learn about yourself and your body to continue to make progress over a long period of time.

Yeah, it just leaves me scratching my head. I like to not just understand how it is, but to understand why it is, y'know? I FEEL far more beat up after a squat set than a press or bench set. I FEEL recovered from bench and press far sooner than 10 minutes. But for some reason the 10 minute wait does the trick. Plan is to shrink the rest interval down little by little to find the sweet spot on those lifts. Was hoping to get started on that experiment today, but today was just a baaaad lifting day. Hoping Tuesday will fare better. Need to rest up and remember to brace better on my squat. Pulled something in my lower back I think, and it threw off the rest of the workout.