Just a quick one today to discuss a fairly frequent occurrence in the world of online coaching and the gym in general: Dealing with misloads.
Say you’re assigned 3 sets of 5 in the bench press at 210, 225, 210 lbs respectively. Three work sets, with the top (hardest, heaviest set) in the middle. You eagerly begin your warmups, excited to hit that 225x5 middle set. You’ve been at this for a couple years, so 225x5 isn’t a PR anymore, but is still close to your all time best of 240x5. You remember first hitting it for a max single not that long ago, and it’s still exciting to hit that milestone weight for a routine set of 5 reps on a volume day.
You’re so excited, in fact, that you get distracted by the anticipation and misload the first work set: instead of doing the 210 as assigned, you load a 5 and a 2.5 instead of a 10 and a 2.5, so you only did 200. Damn? What now?
The vast majority of people will discount the 200x5 set just completed, and go on to do 210x5, 225x5, 210x5 as assigned. But this is absolutely the wrong choice. Surprised? Let’s discuss why.
The Spirit of the Assignment
One of the hardest concepts for people to learn, but one that is essential, is understanding the spirit of the assignment, rather than just the letter. While under normal circumstances, you should do the assignments “to the letter,” understanding the spirit is necessary for special circumstances. And while these circumstances shouldn’t happen often, if you train long enough, they WILL happen, and you need to know how to manage them.
In this case, the spirit of the assignment is: 3 heavy, but not maximal, work sets of 5 reps in the bench press, with the top middle set being close to max without being quite there. You might also say something like “a moderate dose of bench volume work for the day, ideally performed for 3 sets of 5 reps in the high 80s to low 90s percent of your 5 rep max.” There’s more than one way to correctly formulate this, but the idea, the concept should be pretty clear and easy to understand: there are the literal sets, reps, and weight assigned. And then there is what they represent in the broader scheme of programming, and the stress→recovery→adaptation cycle. So it’s not surprising that there’s more than one right way to formulate the spirit of the assignment - that’s inherent to it being the spirit rather than the letter. There’s plenty of wrong ways, but there’ll usually be more than one right way.
Putting it Together
Hopefully by now you’re starting to figure out why most people’s instinct to do all 3 assigned sets of 210x5, 225x5, and 210x5 - after first misloading and doing 200x5, is wrong.
That first set at 200x5 is essentially in the spirit of the 210x5 first work set assigned. Yes, it’s not ideal - it should’ve been 210. But in terms of numbers, it’s pretty close to the assignment - only 4% further from your 240x5 max (87 vs 83%), and 5% less weight in total. So it’s close enough to still “count” as a volume work set.
That being the case, let’s do some more arithmetic. What do you lose by doing 200x5 instead of 210x5? You lose 50 total lbs of tonnage on the workout. Again not ideal, but not very much. Less than 1/4 of one rep of one work set.
Whereas if you go on to do an extra set of 210x5 since “the first set didn’t count,” what does that get you? It gets you 1050 extra lbs more than assigned (210x5). The 1050 lbs of additional work dwarfs the 50 lbs less that it would've been if you'd just counted 200 as a work set and moved on. You’re now twenty one times more over-worked than you would have been underworked had you just counted 200x5 as the first work set and continued to 225. TWENTY ONE TIMES MORE.
While paying closer attention and doing the assignment as written is ideal, doing 1050 lbs too much disrupts the status quo more, and is less in line with the actual assignment, than doing 50 lbs too little, by a mile.
Stop Being Obsessed with the Details and Learn to See the Big Picture
The next logical question you might ask is, ok cool, but what if it was 190 instead of 200? What about 175? Where is the cutoff?
This is simultaneously a logical question, and one that shows that you don’t yet understand grokking the spirit of the assignment vs its letter. There’s no exact number - no exact assignment - that can tell you this. It’s something you start to learn as you move past your novice phase and become a more fully actualized lifter. I can’t just give a percentage that you use as a hard rule for the rest of your life.
I’ve written before about how absolute weight matters and percentages aren’t everything: The stronger you are, the lower percentages you can use for some of your work sets. When my e1RM deadlift was in the mid-700s, I was still regularly using weights in the low 400s for some of my work sets. This was only about 55% of my estimated max at the time. If you take someone whose best deadlift is 185 and give them 100 lbs, this will do nothing for them except waste time. But if you take a guy who pulls 750 and give him some work at 425, this can still be productive and contribute to his overall strength increases. Of course a lot of his work will still need to be much heavier, but some amount can be in that range and still be productive.
We don’t know the exact parameters of this, but it’s something you learn over time by lifting. You don’t - you CAN’T - learn exactly how to apply this to your own training by rotely following numbers from a spreadsheet. You have to learn this by experience, by paying attention to how your body works and responds at different loads and reps as you get stronger.
In other words, you have to start understanding the spirit of the thing, rather than just the letter of the thing. And no one can give this to you, not even the best coach. We can help you get there, we can give you the concept. But only by paying attention to your own training and applying it over time, can you really understand how it works and applies to your own body.
So don’t just go to the gym and lift some weights from your spreadsheet. Instead, become a lifter, and understand the spirit of the assignment, not just the letter.
It cuts against both my OCD and the mentality that "MOAR is better for GAINZ." A lesson I learned late is the maxim that "your strength gains are not limited by how hard you work, but by how well you recover." I have actually had better results recently with dialing things back _just_ a little.