Our athletes are about to test their back and front squat, bench and deadlift.

In the lead up, we’ve had some heavy days working up to doubles at 90% of their training maxes.

But I noticed that some of them were calculating their percentages off their true 1RM or even worse, their all-time PRs.

Your training max is a load that you know you can lift any day of the week, with perfect form and smooth bar speed, even if you are feeling a bit tired or flat that day. For most people this number is around 90-93% of their true 1RM (which will usually involve imperfect form).

If you are working off a max that is a true 1RM rather than a training max, it is likely that you will break down in form and all your reps will be too slow and grindy. This will place excessive strain on your nervous system and rather than make you stronger, it will make you weaker and possibly injured.

We never want to miss a deadlift, squat or bench press rep during training (the Olympic lifts are a bit different as they are more dynamic and involve more timing, although misses MUST still be minimised and occur quite rarely).

If you fail a rep then it was too heavy, so stay away from that kind of load.

You don’t get stronger from missing lifts, you get stronger from consistently making lifts with appropriate loading and progression over time.

I hope you have found this beneficial either as a coach or athlete (or both!)