Hey Athletes! When should you update your 1 rep max? Tune in to this week’s AMA to find out!
Episode 45 of Ask Me Anything is up!
Ask Me Anything: When to Update Your 1 Rep Max
This week’s question is from Kimberly. She asks about sticking to the weight percentages in training. Specifically when she feels they are too light. Jerred and Joe give their ideas on when you should update your 1 rep max and when you should dial it back!
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast either on Stitcher, iTunes, or Google Play by using the link below:
Related Resources at End of Three Fitness:
- How to Tackle Max Effort Testing, New Training Cycles, and the Great Gluten Beer Test
- S5E2: Warming Up, 1-Rep Maxes, and not Dying
Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!
To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
Ask Me Anything: When to Update Your 1 Rep Max
Jerred Moon
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jerred. Moon here with Joe. Courtney. What’s up, Joe?
Joe Courtney
Hey, man, how you doing?
Jerred Moon
Fantastic. Another day, another getting comfort book.
There.
Jerred Moon
It’s on the screen if you’re listening. Yeah, go to killing, comfort, calm by book and kill some comfort. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. can’t plug your own stuff. You gotta you gotta be talking ama. So we are doing an AMA. So garage gym athlete.com slash ama, if you want to ask a question. A lot of people have been submitting questions, which is cool. And the reason I think it’s cool is because we don’t link to this anywhere. Like, yeah, there’s not a place that you can find this on the website. If you’re like, yeah, I listen to podcasts, I can’t remember, maybe I’ll just go to garage gym athlete calm and find it, you won’t find it. We hide it. So the only way for people to submit a question is to actually go type that you URL in with the slash in the AMA and get there. And you guys are doing it. And I think it’s awesome. So I really appreciate you submitting the questions. If you do have a question, anything you’d like to be covered some of these things that we have been pulled or asked, we’re like, oh, that’s going to be better for like a full on study that we cover on the Monday episodes. So so you know, even no matter how big your question is, just submit it, or how small it is submit it, and we’ll get to it. But thank you guys, for everyone who has submitted. Let’s get to today’s. It’s from Kimberly, ah, she says, How important is it to stick to the recommended weight percentages during training. For example, this past week, the deadlift and front squat squat, were programmed from the 75 to 85% rep max ranges. However, I feel like I’ve gotten way stronger since I performed the one rep max. And those ranges were relatively easy. Can I bump it up? What bumping it up helped me to achieve larger gains, the next time I test the one rep max? Or is it more important for me to stay within the prescribed range. And I honestly could go both ways on this one. So maybe I’ll talk about that. But Joe want to hear what you have to say first.
Joe Courtney
So I thought of a couple things on this. But one of them, one of them that came to mind was so I first didn’t realize they would be doing it for the hire. But a lot of people have this problem on the lower end as well to where the recommended weight that we want them to lift to be feel like a struggle or a burden. And when we do temple lifting, that’s why we don’t do we don’t typically don’t do percentages with tempo lifting because it’s the intent of what so hitting a tempo is better than hitting a certain weight. And same same could be said for, you know, some of the lower percentages 75%. If it’s called for five reps, and you felt like you can do 910 11? Well, maybe it’s because we wanted you to move the weight fast. So it’s not always about, okay, key lifting the maximum weight for the reps given it’s the intent of what do the rep scheme that we want you to do. So whether it’s a slower tempo, an explosive lift, moving faster, recovering more, or, you know, it’s all the programming, it’s everything’s being calculated what you’re lifting anyway. So you also might be getting accessory work somewhere else’s, as well. So there’s a lot of factors that will go into it. So I would say to make sure if your Mac’s fairly recent, then you’re fine. But if you haven’t maxed out in like six months in that manner, that’s a different that’s a different thing. But I would say it’s usually due to the intent and if you’re feeling stronger usually that’s those are the times where when I’m hitting these percentages, and I’m feeling great then I’m like okay, I can’t wait for perfect week so that I can max out again because I think I’m going to smash PR
Jerred Moon
Yeah, so I just recently did a video called it wasn’t called the PR squeeze you can find it on our YouTube channel. It wasn’t published as a podcast. So if you are only listen to the podcast, maybe go to the YouTube channel and check it out where I talk about kind of this principle so I like I said I can kind of go both ways. So what we did in the BCT track or how I programmed it is we did an aggressive first four weeks a lot of volume heavyweight. And then immediately at the end of the fourth week, we retested our back squats and I explained in that video The reason I did that is because I want to quickly adjust any you know when you when you first start a new program, there gonna be some rapid adaptations and I want to adjust for those adaptations as quick as I can so you’re operating off of a more accurate max so you are seeing a little bit more benefit when I’m telling you to do this many sets this many reps at this percentage you are going to see more benefit if your one rep max is accurate. Now, you’re not on the BCT track. So You didn’t do this crazy amount of volume in four weeks. So my answer to this would be, it kind of depends on where you’re at in the cycle. If you’re feeling this way, like, week eight or nine, that’s awesome. Just hold off until we test at the end of the 12 weeks, if you’re feeling that way, I’d say between weeks three and five, then I would absolutely just retest You know, when make a big deal out of it, I would just be like, if if we hit 85%, on the back squat that day, and your second or third set feels just easy, I might just take it up, like kind of go off the the path here, go off the programming and and test your one rep max, if you are that confident, then it’s gone up a significant amount. Because if you are thinking like a five pound PR, that’s not if you just do the math, it’s not going to be that big of a deal in the calculations that 80%. But if we’re talking like we did in the BCG track, or some people hit a 40 pound PR, that’s a significant difference in calculating your one rep max when you’re lifting. So it’s it’s very important to keep those things updated. So hopefully, I kind of gave you some parameters on updating your max and when you should test. We don’t like test or program it more than every 12 weeks and a lot of our athletes don’t even test every max every 12 weeks, they kind of maybe we’ll skip a cycle here and there. But if you’re feeling strong, depending on where it is in the cycle, retest or wait and just crush it during fit week.
Joe Courtney
Yeah, basically it
Jerred Moon
cool. Well, thanks for the question. If you guys do have any questions, go to garage, gym athlete comm slash ama, submit your question and we will get to it. If you’re listening to the podcast, please five star review. positive comment. We just past 400 The last time I checked. And if we could get more reviews and ratings that would be phenomenal. Because it’s not something we focus on a lot, but it is something that can really help the show out and reach more people. If you’re on YouTube, subscribe to the channel. We have a lot of cool stuff coming out. We’ve just been publishing a lot more YouTube content. So you want to subscribe to the channel. Make sure that you get notified about that. Leave us some comments what you like what you don’t like and thumbs up. And that’s about it guys. Thanks for listening or watching