Stability of a practical measure of recovery from resistance training

McLester et al. (2003) proposed a practical protocol to determine optimal recovery times between resistance training workouts. For this protocol to be useful, it must be stable. The purpose of this study was to investigate the stability of that protocol. College-aged resistance trained men (n = 10) performed 3 sets to volitional failure using a 10-repetition maximum load for 6 exercises. Recovery was evaluated on 4 occasions by the number of repetitions performed for each individual exercise after recovery periods of 48, 72, 96, and 120 hours in counterbalanced order. To evaluate stability, this procedure was performed twice. The number of repetitions after each recovery interval were compared with initial baseline performances. A priori, adequate stability was defined as 70% of the participants achieving similar recovery duration on both trials. Pooled repetitions over all 6 exercises indicated that 80% of participants returned to baseline strength levels after the same recovery duration for both trials. However, when individual muscle group repetition performance was evaluated, stability varied from 20 to 70%. Variability in rest, nutrition, prior activity, and other factors probably induced instability in individual strength measures, but not sufficiently to influence the aggregate results. Some muscle groups may have greater sensitivity to variations in ecological factors such as these. We believe that the tested protocol may be useful in establishing recovery times for multimuscle group workouts, but not stable enough to be useful in establishing recovery times for individual muscle groups.