Prescribed Rest Intervals in Home-Based Exercise Therapy and Rehabilitation: A Narrative Review and Conceptual...

Adherence to home-based exercise programs is central to rehabilitation, yet adherence to prescribed rest intervals remains largely unexplored. This narrative review synthesized relevant literature identified through targeted, purposive searches of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for publications from 2000 to 20 July 2026, supplemented by reference-list screening. Direct evidence is extremely limited: no study identified prospectively quantified adherence to prescribed rest intervals in a home-based rehabilitation setting. Accordingly, most interpretation is extrapolated from broader literature on general exercise adherence, resistance training, telerehabilitation, and digital monitoring. Rest duration can influence neuromuscular recovery, fatigue, and performance, providing a physiological rationale for studying recovery timing, but these effects do not establish the clinical consequences of rest-interval non-adherence. We distinguish participant adherence from intervention fidelity and propose temporal fidelity as a hypothesis-generating framework describing concordance between the intended and implemented timing structure of exercise. Explicit prescriptions, patient education, simplified timing cues, supervised familiarization, and digital monitoring are presented as candidate strategies rather than established rest-specific interventions. Prospective studies should objectively measure prescribed and actual recovery periods and determine whether temporal fidelity predicts or improves rehabilitation outcomes.