I want to talk to you about something I picked up from Marius Bakken's book on the Norwegian Method — a small idea that ends up mattering a lot more than it sounds like it should.
It's about rest.
Specifically, it's about what happens when you take more of it than you think you need.
Let's use a common workout as the example — four by ten minutes at sweet spot. If you're not familiar, sweet spot sits between tempo and threshold. It's an intensity that makes you work, but it shouldn't wreck you. You should be able to get through four of these intervals without falling apart.
Traditionally, the rest between those intervals is short — 2 to 3 minutes. The logic makes sense on paper: the workout isn't that long, and it isn't that intense, so you don't need much recovery to get back at it.
But here's the question I want you to sit with: what happens if we take that rest from 3 minutes to 5?
I already know what a lot of you are thinking. Shorter rest means I'm getting back into the work faster. Isn't that a better stimulus? Aren't I losing training value by resting longer?
Fair question. And the honest answer is: it depends on what you're actually trying to accomplish.
If your goal is a long, steady stimulus with minimal recovery — the kind of grinding, stacked fatigue you're chasing on purpose — then yes, 2 to 3 minutes fits that job.
But that's not the only job sweet spot work can do.
This is where Bakken's point lands. The fitter you are, the faster your system resets between hard efforts. And when you give it more time to do that resetting:
In other words, those extra two minutes let your body actually stabilize instead of just barely catching its breath before you go again.
I've talked before about protecting the integrity of your intervals — making sure the quality of the work you're doing stays high instead of degrading rep after rep. This is the same principle, just applied to the rest period instead of the work period.
If the goal is the highest quality ten-minute sweet spot interval you can produce — four times in a row — then longer rest is often the better call. Those two extra minutes give you the chance to actually reset: drink some water, let your metrics come back down, and walk into the next interval from a lower starting point than you would with only three minutes.
And here's the part that trips people up: you can still hit the same power. You can still hit the same heart rate with three minutes of rest as you can with five. The external numbers might look identical on your file.
But what's happening underneath the surface — the stuff you won't see unless you're wearing a lactate meter — is different. There's extra recovery happening in those two minutes that isn't showing up as an obvious number. And because of that, each of those four intervals is straining you a little less than it otherwise would.
This is where it really pays off — not in one workout, but across weeks.
If you're trying to get two or three of these sessions in during a week (which, for a lot of athletes juggling work, family, and training, already sounds like a lot), the way you make that sustainable is by taking a little more rest and letting each session take a little less out of you.
Do that, and you extend how long you can keep doing this kind of work. You get more sessions in over time, not fewer. And I'd argue that consistently repeatable quality work beats a handful of sessions where you shaved rest down to the minimum and walked away more depleted than you needed to be.
Shorten the rest too aggressively, stack that fatigue session after session, and you risk a snowball effect — especially if you're not respecting your recovery days in between. That's a conversation on its own, and one I've covered in other content, but it's worth repeating here: the rest between intervals and the rest between sessions are both part of the same equation.
More rest isn't the enemy of a good training stimulus. Sometimes it's the thing that lets you access one.
Next time you're staring down a sweet spot session, don't assume shorter rest is automatically the harder, more effective choice. Ask what you're actually training for that day — and consider that the extra two minutes might be doing more for you than the extra two minutes of "work" ever would.
Want more breakdowns like this — the kind of detail that doesn't usually make it into a basic training plan? That's exactly what the Utmost Performance newsletter is for. And if you're looking for a coach who thinks this deeply about every session on your calendar, reach out — let's talk about what that could look like for you.
— Mayito
