How do I pick the right weight for a workout?
Coach, now that we’ve had our first training sessions together (and the workouts are great, by the way!), I need to know how to progress on my own, since I am not going to be working with you every time that I train. How do I know when to go up in weight, and how much?
Concept 5: Challenge the Body When You Are at the End of a Series
Although 2% is the amount of increase from one set to another that your body should accept, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is all it will accept. In C1, the trainee does a perfect job of executing this principle, progressively increasing the load by roughly 2% per set until the fourth set, when he increases the load by 5% and gets 8 reps. He is still in the rep range, and he got plenty of volume on the day with three full sets of reps, so it is allowable to try to lift something heavier – within reason – and see what can be produced.
Concept 6: Critical Drop-Off
One of the marks of a seasoned veteran of training is the ability to push through barriers and achieve new personal bests. Another equally important quality is knowing when to call it quits for the day.
Critical drop-off is the phenomenon that occurs when it becomes counter productive to continue to do more work at the expense of the quality of that work. Critical drop-off is dependent upon several factors – where you are in the training phase, your strength, body composition, goals, and how close you are to competition, but generally speaking, there are two numbers to bear in mind.
If you are training primarily for hypertrophy – gains in muscle mass, fat loss, etc., the critical drop off is 20%. That means that if you must lower the weight you lift in a given exercise by more than 20% to remain in the rep range, you should skip the remainder of the sets. When training primarily for strength, that percentage drops to 7%. In highly competitive athletes, the percentage can be even lower.
So in the above example, our trainee’s fourth set in C2 is a garbage set, because he began at 65 lbs, and by his third set, has already degraded in performance by over 13 lbs, or 20% of 65, for the day. Better to leave the training floor at that point rather than further exhaust the body. While the human body is very well equipped not to over train from intensity, because if a weight is too intense (heavy), then you just won’t be able to lift it, we are not well equipped to keep from overtraining from volume. You can always make a weight lighter; sometimes it makes no sense to do so.
