What if your weight is too heavy.

E

elsie3

Cathlete
What do you guys do when your weight is too heavy? Say you're in Meso 1 and you reach failure at 8 or 9 reps instead of 15. Do you call it good because you've reached failure? Or do you reduce your weight and try the set again?

Most of my 1RM's are spot on, but some of the shoulder and triceps exercises are leading me to failure too early.

Thanks,
 
This happened to me a lot with chest & shoulders. I had a second pair of weights handy (about 1-2 lbs lighter than the 1RM, which doesn't sound like a lot but it makes a huge difference) and would do what I could with the recommended weight and just drop to my "on call" set if I needed it. I did try to push through but if I found my form suffering then I'd lighten up. I also noted how many I was able to do with the heavier weight and aimed to surpass that the next go-round.

I also saw significant strength gains so I guess it worked!
 
meliffy18 said:
This happened to me a lot with chest & shoulders. I had a second pair of weights handy (about 1-2 lbs lighter than the 1RM, which doesn't sound like a lot but it makes a huge difference) and would do what I could with the recommended weight and just drop to my "on call" set if I needed it. I did try to push through but if I found my form suffering then I'd lighten up. I also noted how many I was able to do with the heavier weight and aimed to surpass that the next go-round.

I also saw significant strength gains so I guess it worked!
Click to expand...

Great suggestion. Thanks for the reply.
 
Depends on the mesocycle and how many reps I'm off. In Meso 1, I'm looking for endurance. If I top out at 6-10, I hit pause, reduce weight, rest briefly, and try again. If that happens two weeks in a row, I recompute the 1RMs. If I hit 15 and don't feel tired, I'll pause/increase/rest and retry. Except shoulders.

In Meso 3, I'm looking for strength, so if I can only get to 6 and the goal is 7-9, I leave it alone and feel good about trying a challenging weight :) If I could only get to 3-4, I'd rest, lighten, and retry ... unless the muscle is twinging, in which case I'd leave it alone. Also, deadlifts. If the reason I couldn't make a lift is a tired lower back, I just stop and don't do them again that day.

Meso 2 is in the middle - hypertrophy - and I would stop and pick up a heavier weight if it seemed obvious I was going to be able to go beyond 14, and I'd pause, rest, lighten, repeat if I was below 10.

Those numbers are more estimates, btw, not hard and fast. Mainly what I like to do is get in the rep range for the workout goal as much as possible. If the failure to meet reps happens towards the end of an hour, I might also just put it down to muscle fatigue unless it happened two weeks in a row. If earlier, I'd be more apt to rethink the weight.

This is only my second time through STS as designed, but I used parts of the various mesocycles through much of last year and this approach worked really well for me then.
 
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