Missing Reps=Missing Out

Everyone who has ever been a part of the iron game for an extended period of time knows what missing reps can do for your progress. Often, inexperienced lifters will set themselves up for failure when they see a prescribed amount of reps with out any inclination as to what weight they will be using. Usually the athlete will load the bar with some absurd weight and fall short by a couple reps or call on the great spotting assistance of their partner to finish them out. This is why it is hard for me to simply prescribe lets say 4x5 and expect all the athletes to take progressive fatigue, subjective readiness, and RPE into account and complete every rep. Because when you miss reps the thing you are missing out on is progress.

The solution that I utilize is relative intensities. As stated before I use a form of the 531 method to prescribe the reps for the athletes. In the first cycle we used 90% of their one rep max to calculate the intensity of the lifts which is called their workout max. They then find the percentage for the lift based off this number. Here is an example of a running backs current set up:

Max Bench 310
Workout max:280

The significance of working under your max is that it makes it nearly impossible to miss the recommended reps prescribed. But you may ask how then do they attain progressive overload? The beauty of this system is that on the last set you perform until technical failure. This takes care of subjective readiness by giving them an easily attainable weight that they should get at least the prescribed reps. So if they are not feeling great that day they should still be able to complete the reps. But when feeling great this also allows them to push up the RPE by working the last set up to a rep max close to or passing the previous PR. In the end we don't get missed reps, guys are setting PR's because they are able to get in the needed volume to progress, and the psychological aspect of knowing you have to get as many reps as possible makes the athletes focus hard on surpassing previous PR's. Here is that same running backs results from today's workout:

2 weeks later
Prescribed reps-3
Prescribed percentage-98
Last set-275x6=320 PR!

This has been a regular occurrence with many athletes on many of the lifts many whom had plateaued coming into the season. This has been largely due to the fact that they are no longer missing reps. Not only does missing these reps on a prescribed set render it nearly useless, the mental tole from the shear disappointment has a negative effect on the rest of the workout too. Remember, competitors hate to fail at anything. Missing reps is failure. With the next cycle coming on quick and therefore the increase in relative intensity, I am excited to see the numbers continue to climb.