Mozart believed that that the Rests between notes were just as important as the musical notes themselves.

I too believe the rests between your sets in working out are equally as important the as how much you lift.

No matter whether you're lifting weights, kettlebells, doing bodyweight exercises, sprinting, etc., there' a lot of controversy to how much to rest in between sets.

I feel it's always good to change it up and keep records of your progress because sometimes your body just can't recover quick enough from the prior day's workout even when you do everything "right" in eating, getting enough sleep, and keep your mental electrical charge high and motivated.

The Rest is just as important as the actual workout sometimes if your body has not fully recovered.

With all the literature there is on how much to rest between sets, I do believe it's the quality of your rest between sets that's most important.

How long exactly is 30 seconds if you're not counting the seconds or watching a clock? 40 seconds? Most people don't have that great of a sense of time if they're not counting or looking directly at a clock.

Yet, even with all the emphasis on how much to rest between sets, I rarely ever see anyone looking at their watches or keeping precise track of either their time between sets - or their actual weight for that matter.

This is interesting to me. I don't usually travel with any sheet music on my concert tours and can remember and perform thousands of notes in just one piece of music. But yet, I can't remember exactly what exercises I did the day before yesterday, how many sets I did, how many reps, what set did I feel fatigue on, whether I performed at a 7 or a 9.5, etc. - unless I write them down.

I think most people don't remember these things either - and that's why you see them making minuscule gains through the months, losing momentum, and usually lifting about the same poundage and doing about the same number of reps they did months before.

So getting back to the Rests. Instead of counting the seconds, how about just count your breaths. Do you know how many breaths you normally would breathe in 30 seconds? 40 seconds? 90 seconds?

A great quote from The Sheltering Sky... __________________________________________________________________ "Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, and yet everything happens only a certain number of times ... How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood ... that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps 4 or 5 times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless." __________________________________________________________________

I like to add to that if I may... How many more breaths do you have left? It does us no good to guess, but the ones I have right now, I'd like to have them empower me by counting their quality and enjoying the full expanse of the rise and fall of each precious moment of life to strength me. Full body strength comes from a conscious engagement of every resource including the way we breathe.