Structure

Structure

Training is organized by blocks, called mesocycles. They are generally 4-7 weeks long, and they end up with a deload, which is the last week. The deload is a week that is easier than the rest of the block, which allows your body to fully recover before going to the next block.

Reps in Reserve

In your spreadsheet, you likely have an RIR column. What RIR means is Reps in Reserve, which is how many reps you have in the tank before you fail.

So let’s say that I’m doing a bicep curl, and I’m doing as many reps as I can until I can’t lift my arm anymore. Let’s say I do 20 reps. That was a set with RIR 0, meaning I couldn’t have done another rep. If instead of doing 20 I had done 18, that would be RIR 2, since I could have done 2 more if I wanted and get 20 reps. I may also use the term “F” meaning failure, for sets that are RIR 0.

If you have never trained like this before, it can be a bit confusing. It’s hard to tell exactly how many reps you have unless you actually do it. This is normal and comes with experience. You don’t have to be super precise, just make your best guess, and it will improve overtime. If you send me videos, I can give you some guidelines.

In addition, sometimes going to failure can help, since you can use that as a guideline of what failure feels like. Besides the feeling during a set, the most helpful thing to consider RIR is bar speed. When the RIR is low (you have little reps in reserve), the speed of the reps tends to be low, and with each rep, the speed gets slower and slower.

Repetitions across sets

Because you’re going by how far you are from failure, your reps won’t be the same, which is not how typical programs are written. Most have something like 3 sets of 10 reps, and your sets are all 10 reps. In this method, it’s natural for your reps to drop. So you may get 10 in the first, then 8 in the second, and 6 in the third.

Sometimes your reps drop too much, especially if you have a lot of sets. In that case it’s better to lower the weight. A very general guideline of when to do this is when your reps drop by half. So if you are doing a set of 30, that would be 15. If you’re doing a set of 15, that would be 7 (you can round down), and if you’re doing 10, that would be 5. This is a very rough guideline, and you don’t need to be super strict about this.