Going to the gym may seem like a daunting experience, especially for someone who is unfamiliar with the environment. The biggest mistake a beginner can make when they start to use the gym is to go without a plan. A good plan will not only save you time but also tracks your progress and highlights the areas that you need to put more focus into.

This short article will guide you through the main areas of training load and how you can optimise your plan to suit your needs and capabilities.

What is Training Load?

volume (kg) = total sets x total reps x total weight (kg)

Intensity is the amount of effort your body is putting into the exercise. It is usually gauged off a percentage of your 1-rep maximum (the total amount of weight you can lift for an exercise for 1 repetition). An example of this might be:

100kg squat 1RM at 70% intensity = 70kg

When building a plan, we utilise both training volume and intensity to guide us on the right path, to ensure we are training for our goals.

Why is Training Load important?

With the help from those equations above, we can track and load our workouts according to the goals we set for ourselves. Tracking what we do throughout a session gives us the ability to compare our efforts and accomplishments to previous sessions, and to apply and monitor progressive overload to individual exercises.

Tracking also allows us to apply the right amount of load to our workouts, ensuring we have enough stimulus for growth while minimising the risk for injury from overtraining.

How do we track Training Load?

Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE)

RPE is one of the original and safest ways to manage intensity from exercise. It is as simple as rating your exertion or activity on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the hardest).

When RPE was created in 1982 by Gunner Borg, he initially set the scale as 6 to 20. This may seem like an odd and random scale, but the idea was to reflect the individuals heart rate (6 = 60bpm & 20 = 200bpm). The closer to an RPE of 20, the higher and harder the intensity. From just this idea, you may realise that the scale was better suited for cardiovascular exercise rather than weights training.

The Borg scale, or modified RPE scale (1-10), is still widely used today due to its accuracy in predicting training load in sport and cardiovascular settings. But when it comes to resistance training, it doesn’t have as strong a correlation with training load due to the difference in maximal heart rate at training intensities.

So we use a different loading scale for when it comes to weight training.

Repetitions In Reserve (RIR)

RIR is a much better form of managing and auto regulating training loads in resistance training environments. A rep in reserve just refers to how many more reps an individual would have left in the tank before they fail the lift. For example, if an individual has a maximum rep range of 15 reps for Barbell Bench Press but only went to 12 reps, they would have a 3-RIR (15 reps – 12 reps = 3 reps).

So how does this help us?

Plenty of research over the last 5 years have shown similar results in muscle hypertrophy (muscle growth) when individuals trained to 2-RIR rather than 0-RIR (or maxed out sets). With the results being very similar, leaving reps in the tank allowed for more muscle recovery and effort on preceding sets, making it the better option for programming resistance training. 

It not only helps you recover better between sets (and ultimately get more out of your workout), but it helps with auto regulation. Not every day is going to feel as good or bad as the other, so we need to adjust our workouts accordingly, so we get the most out of them. By using 2-RIR (for most sets), the individual can still work to the necessary intensity to allow for muscle hypertrophy without injuring themselves. This can be beneficial for beginners or for individuals who find it hard to recover properly.

That being said, more intermediate lifters can be pushed a little harder. If possible, we don’t want to restrict ourselves from getting that higher range of loading (1-0RIR) as it does provide some issues. For one, if we never go to complete failure, how are we to know what ‘close’ to failure feels like. I have seen this many times when training clients, the natural sub-consciousness to underestimate how much is left in the tank and therefore leaving ‘gains’ on the table. Secondly, we as humans can get complacent if we aren’t ever pushing ourselves to our limits.

The best way to utilise RIR is to aim for 1-2RIR for the first couple of sets, then push for complete failure on the last set. If your program is set up properly, the set to failure shouldn’t have a massive impact on your proceeding exercises.

1-Repition Maximum (1RM) Percentages