Rest between sets in Zyra Workouts defaults to 60 seconds on isolation exercises, 120–150 seconds on most compound lifts, and 180 seconds on the six heaviest barbell movements. Those defaults come from the exercise catalog, one value per exercise, and can be overridden per program exercise or in the session. The reasoning behind the ladder — and what the published guidance says — is below.
Zyra Workouts is in development and not yet on the App Store; the screens described here may change before release.
Rest by movement type (table)
Every exercise in the catalog carries a defaultRestSec of 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180. Across the 61 exercises the distribution is:
| Default rest | Exercises | What is in the bucket |
|---|---|---|
60 s | 25 | Isolation work: lateral raises, curls, pushdowns, leg extensions and curls, calf raises, core holds, plus push-ups |
90 s | 6 | Barbell curl, skull crusher, tricep dip, farmer's carry, hanging leg raise, ab-wheel rollout |
120 s | 12 | Mid-weight compounds: dumbbell and cable rows, lat pulldown, Arnold press, lunges and split squats, dumbbell RDL, good morning, glute bridge, chest dip |
150 s | 12 | Heavier compounds: dumbbell presses, barbell row and RDL, pull-up and chin-up, dumbbell overhead press, close-grip bench, leg press, hack squat, hip thrust |
180 s | 6 | Back squat, front squat, conventional deadlift, barbell bench press, incline barbell bench, barbell overhead press |
The design brief the catalog was built from gave two anchor examples — "lower-body compound 3:00, upper-body isolation 1:30" — and left the rest of the table open. The catalog landed on 180 s for the barbell compounds and went shorter than the brief for isolation work, at 60 s. Either number is a default, not a finding: it is what the timer counts down from when you tick a set.
Why compounds get three minutes
The ladder follows how much a set costs. A set of dumbbell lateral raises loads a small amount of muscle with a light weight; a set of back squats loads most of the body with a heavy one, and the next set is limited by whole-body recovery, not by the target muscle alone. Longer rest lets the next compound set be done with a load close to the last one, which is the whole point of counting sets against a target rep range.
The published guidance points the same way:
- The ACSM position stand on progression recommends 3–5 minute rests between sets for heavy strength loading (1–6 RM), 1–2 minutes for the 6–12 RM hypertrophy zone, and under 90 seconds for local muscular endurance work1.
- The 2018 systematic review by Grgic and colleagues (23 studies, 491 participants) concluded that strength can be gained with rests under 60 seconds, but that rests over 2 minutes appear necessary to maximise strength gains in resistance-trained people, while 60–120 seconds is sufficient in untrained people2.
Read against that, the app's 180 s on the heaviest lifts is the low end of the ACSM strength range and above the review's 2-minute line; the 60 s on isolation work sits in the endurance-to-hypertrophy band. Both are choices within the ranges, not the ranges themselves, and the review's own distinction — trained lifters benefit from more rest than untrained ones — is exactly the kind of thing a fixed default cannot see. A seated cable row at 120 s is a reasonable start; a strong lifter running it heavy may want the 150–180 s of the barbell row.
In plain terms: the heavier and more whole-body the lift, the longer the default; the guidance bodies say 1–2 minutes for growth-zone sets and 3–5 for heavy strength sets, and the app's numbers sit inside those bands.
Overriding the default
Three levels apply, from broadest to narrowest:
- Catalog default — the
defaultRestSecabove, used when nothing else is set. - Program exercise — each exercise in a program can carry its own
restSec, which wins over the catalog whenever that program day is started. - Session — the timer can be adjusted while training; changing it there does not rewrite the program.
A program built for strength on a 3–5 rep scheme is the common case for raising the compound rest toward the ACSM's 3–5 minutes; a short-session program is the common case for lowering isolation rest further or pairing exercises.
Supersets and rest
When two adjacent exercises are grouped as a superset, the app changes one thing about rest: the auto-rest timer fires only after the last member of the group is done. Ticking a set of the first exercise starts nothing; ticking the matching set of the second starts the rest. The timer duration is the second exercise's rest (default or override). That is the mechanism that makes a superset shorter than the two exercises done separately — the first exercise's rest is spent doing the second — and it is why the pairings that work are ones where the second exercise does not compete with the first for the same muscles. The superset page covers the pairings.
The short version
Zyra Workouts rests 60 s after isolation sets, 120–150 s after most compounds and 180 s after the heavy barbell lifts, per exercise, overridable per program and per session. The ACSM puts heavy strength rests at 3–5 min and hypertrophy-zone rests at 1–2 min1; a 2018 review found over 2 min pays off for trained lifters2. Treat the default as a countdown to edit, not a rule to obey.
Educational overview only — training guidance, not medical advice.