Supplemental Lifts vs Accessory Lifts: What they are, and how to determine and adjust the weight when doing them.
Use rep ranges and RPE rather than exact rep number and weight assignments
In my post Making Sense of RPE from a couple months ago, I discussed how rating RPE for accessory lifts is admittedly somewhat subjective, but not useless. You’re more so rating the difficulty of the set as maximum effort, extremely hard, hard, moderate but still work, etc… than you are giving as exact a rating as possible as to how many more reps you could have done.
Using RPE for accessory lifts has another important element that distinguishes it from main lifts, which we’ll discuss below. But to dig into this topic deeper, we need to define what makes something an accessory lift, and how accessories differ from main lifts and supplemental lifts, before coming back to how you can use RPE for accessories.
What is an Accessory Lift?
To define accessory lifts, we must first define a couple other terms: main lift and supplemental lifts. Like many useful definitions and categories, these have some edge cases at the margins but are still very useful for defining and categorizing the work we do into different buckets that we can use for conceptual and programming purposes.
Main Lifts
Main lifts are simply the competition version of the "Big 4” basic barbell lifts: squat, bench press, deadlift, and press. If you’re a die hard powerlifter, you probably use Big 3 instead of Big 4, and would bucket the press outside the main lifts. But for general strength and conditioning purposes, and in my opinion even for powerlifters outside of competition prep, the press should be included as a main lift.
An edge case is something like a sumo deadlift, which is a competition version for some lifters but not for others.
Supplemental Lifts
Supplemental lifts are variations on the main lift. They look like the main lift, but have a shorter or longer range of motion (ROM), or some other different characteristic that changes the movement pattern slightly, while still looking like and being very similar to the main lift version.
Examples of supplemental lifts where ROM is manipulated are a deficit deadlift (longer ROM) or rack pull (shorter ROM), for the deadlift. For the bench press, using a cambered bar lengthens the ROM, while using boards or a bench block shortens the ROM.
For squats, a couple of my favorite supplemental lifts are paused squats and safety bar squats. Instead of manipulating the ROM, these variations introduce other variables into the equation, such a dead stop at the bottom removing the stretch reflex rebound at the bottom of a regular squat. The safety bar changes the center of mass of the weight and makes it marginally unstable, which slightly changes the emphasis of the musculature used during the lift and the body arrangement you’ll need to do to stay in balance over the middle of your foot. Both of these supplemental lifts change the movement pattern of the main lift slightly, while still being a systemic, axially loaded, full ROM squat that you can do with heavy weight.
In sum, supplemental lifts are lifts that are versions or variations of the main lift, with something a little different about them, like a shorter or longer ROM, or a small alteration to the movement pattern.
An edge case for supplemental lifts to accessories could be something like a belt squat or dumbbell bench press - both can still be done heavy, and with similar movement pattern and ROM as the main lift, but using different equipment and with other sufficiently different aspects (lack of compressive loading for the belt squat, independently moving arms in the DB bench, wherein one side can fail while the other succeeds) as to make it a bit unclear.
Accessory Lifts
Accessory lifts are movements that train targeted areas in ways that do not mimic the main lifts in any way. They strengthen a portion of the muscle mass involved in the movement in a way that the main and supplemental lifts do not.
Examples here are myriad, but some popular ones are chin-ups or lat pulldowns, rows, arm work, knee extensions and curls, and lateral raises.
Accessory work is often thought of as “bodybuilding” or bodybuilding style training, but this is highly over-simplified. Most people who train for strength long enough will do some accessory lifts as part of their program at some point, and bodybuilders also do compound lifts.
Using RPE for Accessories: Rep Ranges, Not Exact Rep Assignments
Now that we know what an accessory lift is, it’s pretty easy to understand why there’s confusion about how to use RPE for them. That’s why I wrote the aforementioned Making Sense of RPE article, in which I explained how to rate RPE on accessories. You should read that short article now if you haven’t already, as understanding it will be key to going further. But in that article, I didn’t elaborate very much on how to actually use RPE for accessories, just on how to rate it differently than for main lifts. I’ll correct that now.
The best way to use RPE on accessories is to think about rep assignments for accessories as ranges, rather than an exact number. Whereas in main lifts or even supplementals, when you’re assigned, say 5 reps at 275 lbs with an RPE of 8, then if you get to 5 reps with 275 lbs and the RPE is only 7, then stop there and for the next set add ~3%. In this case 3% is about10 lbs - and try the next set with 285. You don’t do extra reps, just add weight. This clarification was the subject of another recent article, RPE and Microscopy: Adjust the Weight, not Reps or Sets.
But with accessories, inherent in their performance is that both rating of RPE and the exact rep assignment are both less precise. Accessories are typically performed for sets of 8 or more. So a convenient way to think about accessory lift assignments is as follows:
8 reps = 8-10
10 reps = 10-12
12 reps = 12-15
15 reps = 15-20
20+ reps = madness. What is this, a triathlon?!
Combining this understanding with RPE, the way to do it is as follows. We’ll use an assignment of 3 sets of 10 at RPE 8.
Combining our understanding of RPE for accessory lifts and using ranges instead of an exact rep number, this translates to: “3 sets of 10-12 reps, at a difficulty level of a hard, challenging set, but could definitely do more.”
You get to 10 reps, but it’s not RPE 8 yet. Instead of stopping here and adding weight to the next set like you would do for a main lift, keep going up to 12 reps to see if doing so yields the target RPE. If so, stay there and complete sets of 10-12 reps. If not, stop at 12 and add weight to the next set, repeating the process until you find the weight that yields the correct RPE target, in the 10-12 rep RANGE, rather than EXACTLY 10 reps.
Same for 8-10. Same for 12-15. Same for 15-20, if your coach hates you and programs such high reps.
With this full explanation in hand, you should now be armed and ready to find the correct weight for your accessory exercises and reap the full benefits from them.