Score of 3 or below might warrant a 1 minute rest, whereas scores of 9-10 would indicate the need for longer rests of perhaps 4-5mins. To retain a degree of measurability, you could rate your level of exertion on a scale 1-10 after each set, and time your rest based on the result. Early on in the session, particularly during your warm-ups you’ll want to take shorter rests than at the end when you’ll need more time to recover between sets. Agree your rest periods with your coach and keep them consistent to ensure a fair test.Īnother effective approach - and my personal preference - is to take increasingly longer rests as you progress through the test. It can work well for some individuals to rest as little as 1-2mins between heavy lifts, but in general longer rests allow your body time to replenish energy in the muscles. In general, these are the lifts that would provide you with useful information for your training:Īs with your usual weight training, you’ll want to rest somewhere between 1-5 minutes or more after each set. There might be some special cases where I’d test with an exercise not on this list, but that would be very specific to the client. This list sums up all of the exercises I would use to test 1RM with most clients. You also can’t test a one rep max for any old exercise. Testing anything above a 10RM wouldn’t have much useful application in a strength training programme for most people. There are also such things as the 2RM, 5RM, and 10RM (and everything in between, really), but you’d only use these in specific circumstances that required it. This type of test is considered the fitness industry gold standard in measuring a person’s physical strength. To work out your 1RM, you have to perform a one rep max test, which I’ll give you a protocol for in just a moment. For example, if the maximum weight I can lift for one rep in a squat is 50kg, then my one rep max squat would be 50kg. This will give you a pretty good estimation of the maximum amount of weight that you can bench for a single repetition.Your one rep max, or 1RM, is the maximum weight you can lift for a single rep in any given exercise. It doesn’t matter if this number is for a set of 10 reps or a set of 3 reps – so consult your workout logs and figure out what your absolute best set was.įinally, just plug that weight and the number of reps you are able to lift it for into the calculator below. Using The One Rep Max Calculatorįirst of all, pick an exercise that you want to know your one rep max for.įor this example, let’s go with the bench press, since that is the exercise that the majority of people care about the most.Īfter that, determine the maximum amount of weight that you are currently lifting for your heaviest sets. Thankfully, with the help of this nifty one rep max calculator, finding this number for all of your main exercises becomes very simple. Unless you’re a powerlifter, or structure your workouts so as to frequently test your one rep max when you’re fresh, then realistically you’re just hazarding a guess about what you are actually able to lift. Well, most people simply don’t have a clue what this number really is, because they don’t actually lift weights like that! That is, it can come in very handy when you are looking to vary the rep range for a particular exercise.įor instance, a certain protocol might call for you to be lifting at 70% of your one rep max.Īnother might have you doing sets with weight that is 85% of your one rep max. It’s a rare person that works out often who doesn’t care about this (to some degree, at least).īut all of that aside, there is actually another very important reason why knowing your one rep max can be useful… In my experience, the vast majority of gym-goers want to know what the maximum amount of weight they can lift is. Well, there are actually several reasons why knowing this number is useful.įirst of all, let’s be honest here, you care about it for your ego. Now you might be wondering why this matters, right? Quite simply, this is the maximum amount of weight that you can lift for a single repetition. In the vast majority of cases, when someone asks you how much can you bench, or squat, or deadlift, they are referring to what is known as your one rep max. How To Calculate Your One Rep Max When someone asks you how much weight you can lift, what does it actually mean?Īre they talking about how much weight you can put up for 10 reps, 8 reps, or 5 reps?
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