Strength · 11 min read

Picking Your Working Weight for Any Rep Scheme

Written by Coach Ohm · reviewed 2026-08-30

Try it: 1RM and Working Weight Calculator — Estimate a 1RM from a real set, then get working weights and a warm-up ladder.

Once you have a max estimate, choosing weights stops being a guess. The percentages have been stable for decades and they apply to almost everyone within a few points.

What follows is the same table used by coaches across strength sports, translated into an actual number of kilograms once it is applied to a real estimate, plus the adjustments that keep it from becoming a rigid rule that ignores how an individual session actually feels.

The percentage table

The working weight calculator applies these to your estimate and rounds to the plates you actually own.

Why the table looks the way it does

The shape of the table is not arbitrary. As reps climb from one toward fifteen, the percentage that can be handled falls, but not in a straight line — the drop is steeper near the top of the table and flatter near the bottom. Going from a single to a triple costs a noticeably larger percentage than going from a set of twelve to a set of fifteen, even though both comparisons are "three more reps." This reflects how quickly maximal force production tails off compared to how slowly muscular endurance tails off over the same span of reps — the two qualities decay at different rates, and the table's curve is simply tracing that difference rather than applying one flat rule across the whole range.

This is also why the table stops being reliable much past about fifteen reps. Beyond that point, the percentage needed to reach a given rep count keeps falling only slowly, while how long someone can sustain that effort becomes the dominant factor in whether the set gets completed — conditioning and pacing start to matter more than the percentage on the bar. The table is built for the range where strength, not endurance, is still the main thing being tested, which is also why it sits at the centre of most well-designed strength programmes rather than at the fringes of them.

These percentages are for a set taken near failure

That is the assumption baked into the table and the thing that most often makes it seem wrong. Eighty per cent for eight reps means eight hard reps, not eight comfortable ones. If you are programming three sets of eight and taking each one to genuine failure, you are doing something different from three sets of eight at 80 per cent — and you will not recover from it as well.

Worked example: applying the table to a real estimate

Take the 100-kilogram-for-3-reps set used elsewhere on this site. Epley reads that as a 110-kilogram one-rep max. Brzycki, more conservatively, reads it as 106. As covered in estimating your 1RM, the two formulas disagreeing by a few kilograms is normal, and the practical answer is to lean on the more conservative of the two for anything near the top of the table.

Using Brzycki's 106: a top single, 100 per cent, is 106 kilograms — not far off the 100 kilograms already lifted for the triple that produced the estimate in the first place, which makes sense, because a genuine near-failure triple is already most of the way to a true single. Five reps at 87 per cent works out to roughly 92 kilograms. Eight reps at 80 per cent works out to roughly 85. Ten reps at 75 per cent works out to roughly 80 — which happens to land close to another of the example sets used across this site, a reminder that these are not abstract percentages, they are weights that show up on an actual bar loaded with actual plates.

Using the smaller of the two estimates on purpose

When the two formulas disagree, the conservative habit is to load percentages off the lower of the two numbers for anything near the top of the table — a single, a triple, a genuine top set — and use the calculator's blended average for everything below that. The cost of underestimating a top single by a kilogram or two is nothing. The cost of overestimating it is a grinding, technique-breaking rep under a bar that is heavier than the plan intended, at exactly the point in the rep range where technique has the least room to absorb a mistake.

Reps in reserve, which is the useful adjustment

For most training, leave one to three reps in the tank on most sets. The stimulus is nearly the same, the fatigue is far lower, and the practical result is that you can train the lift more often — which is where the progress actually comes from over months.

A workable default: on your main compound lifts, aim for two reps in reserve on working sets, and take the last set of the last exercise closer to failure if you want. Reserve genuine failure for isolation work where the fatigue cost is low, and where a single failed rep costs almost nothing the next day.

The reason this matters more than it first appears to is recovery cost, not the quality of any single set. Two sets taken to genuine failure and two sets taken with two reps in reserve produce a similar amount of useful stimulus in the moment. What differs is what is left over afterward — failure sets leave far more central fatigue and far more soreness, which shows up as a worse next session, not a worse version of the same one. Across a month, the lifter training with reps in reserve gets more total quality sessions in, and more total quality sessions is what actually drives long-term progress, more reliably than how hard any one of them individually felt.

Learning to judge reps in reserve accurately is itself a skill that takes time. Most people new to it overestimate how much they have left, particularly on lifts where fatigue builds gradually rather than showing up as a sudden, obvious wall — the squat and the deadlift are usually more forgiving to judge than the bench press, where the last rep either moves or it does not, with much less warning beforehand. Video review of a set against how many reps were actually claimed to be in reserve is a genuinely useful, if slightly humbling, way to recalibrate this judgement early on, and it is worth doing at least once even for an experienced lifter who assumes their own sense of reserve is already fully reliable after several long years of accumulated training experience.

Warming up to a top set

The mistake at both ends is common: too little and the first working set is the warm-up; too much and the top set is the fourth-best set of the day.

A ladder that works, with percentages of your top working set rather than your 1RM:

Rep counts fall as weight rises. The purpose of the last two is to rehearse the pattern under load, not to accumulate work.

Warming up wrong: two failure cases

The warm-up ladder above is a template, not a rule that survives every situation unchanged, and two specific ways it goes wrong are worth naming.

The first is skipping steps on a day the top set feels easy in advance — jumping from warm-up two straight to the work set because "it's a light day anyway." This is exactly backwards. The warm-up is not there to prepare for a heavy weight specifically; it is there to prepare the joint and the movement pattern for load in general, and skipping it on an "easy" day is how a genuinely light-feeling session produces an unexpected tweak, because the tissue was never actually warmed to handle load at all, light or not.

The second is running the full ladder before every single working set of a session rather than once at the start. Repeating four warm-up sets ahead of a second or third exercise burns fatigue that should be going toward the work itself, and it is rarely necessary — a shorter version, two ramp-up sets instead of four, usually does the job once the body is already warm from the first movement of the session.

When the table does not fit you

Some people can do considerably more reps at a given percentage than the table predicts, and some fewer. It is an individual trait and it is stable. If you consistently get twelve reps at what the table calls a ten-rep weight, adjust your own table rather than concluding the estimate is wrong — and if you consistently fall short, the likelier explanation is that the max estimate came from a set that was not close enough to failure.

This individual variation shows up most clearly comparing two lifters with very different limb lengths on the same lift. A longer-limbed lifter on the deadlift often has a harder time at percentages the table treats as routine, because the bar travels further per rep and the joint angles at the bottom are less forgiving. A shorter-limbed lifter on the same lift, using the same percentages, can find the table conservative. Neither lifter is doing anything wrong. The table is an average built across many different bodies, and any individual body is allowed to sit off that average in a stable, predictable direction. Once that direction is known for a given lift, adjust the working percentage for that lift specifically rather than assuming the table is generally unreliable across every movement.

Percentages during a calorie deficit

The table itself does not change when running a fat loss phase, but what a given percentage costs to recover from does. A set at 80 per cent that was routine on full calories can carry noticeably more fatigue cost several weeks into a deficit, even though the weight on the bar and the reps performed are identical. This is not the table failing — it is recovery capacity changing underneath a fixed percentage. The response covered in lifting in a deficit is to keep the intensity the table specifies and reduce how much total volume is done at it, rather than reducing the percentage itself. Dropping the weight to compensate for reduced recovery removes the exact signal — genuine heavy load — that the percentage was chosen to provide in the first place.

A failure case: the programme nobody can actually finish

The most common way percentage-based programming goes wrong has nothing to do with the table itself. It is built on a max estimate that was never a good read of the lifter in the first place — usually one entered from a set that was not genuinely close to failure, as covered in the guide on estimating a max. Every percentage that follows inherits that error, and the entire block of training ends up asking for either far more or far less than it should.

The tell is consistent: sessions feel wrong in the same direction, week after week, not just occasionally. If every prescribed set at every prescribed percentage is grinding well before the intended reps in reserve are used up, the estimate behind the whole programme is too high. If every set is finishing with far more left in the tank than planned, it is too low. Either way, the fix is not to push through a badly calibrated block — it is to feed a fresh, honestly-judged set back into the calculator and restart the percentages from a corrected number.

Two weeks of real sessions

Give any new set of working percentages two weeks — roughly four to six sessions on the lift in question — before deciding whether they are right. That is enough sessions to separate a single off day from a genuine pattern, and not so long that a poorly calibrated block does serious damage to either progress or motivation.

What to look for is simple: are the last one or two reps of each working set landing at roughly the intended effort, session after session? If yes, the percentages are doing their job and the only thing left to do is keep training and progress as described below. If working sets are consistently easier or harder than the table predicts, that is real information about how this specific lifter's rep tolerance differs from the table's general assumption — see "when the table does not fit you" below — rather than a sign that anything is broken.

What the percentage does not tell you

A percentage describes an intended load relative to a number calculated from one earlier set. It does not know that today follows a bad night's sleep, or a stressful week, or a heavier-than-usual session two days ago. Bar speed and how a given percentage actually feels vary day to day for reasons the table has no way to see, which is exactly why reps in reserve — an in-the-moment judgement — is a better real-time guide than the percentage number on its own. Treat the percentage as where to start loading the bar, and the felt effort of the set as the final word on whether that weight was actually right today.

It also does not account for how a percentage interacts with fatigue carried over from earlier in the same session, or earlier in the week. The same 80 per cent that feels manageable as the first working set of the day can feel considerably heavier as the third exercise after two other hard lifts. The table describes the lift in isolation. Real sessions are never quite in isolation.

Progression, briefly

When you hit the top of your target rep range on all sets with your two reps still in reserve, add weight — usually 2.5 kilograms on upper body lifts and 5 on lower body. Reps drop, and you climb again. That is the whole mechanism, and it works for a long time before anything more complicated is needed.

The part people underrate is how long "for a long time" actually is. This simple loop — add a small, fixed increment whenever the top of the rep range is hit with reserve intact — carries a beginner through months of genuine progress before it stops working cleanly, and it carries an experienced lifter through slower but still real gains for a long time after that. The percentage table and the reps-in-reserve target do not need to change to keep producing progress. What needs to change, eventually, is patience with how small each individual jump feels, because the jumps themselves stay small even as the total distance covered adds up to something substantial over a year of small, unglamorous jumps that nobody notices happening one at a time.

Read next

• How to Estimate Your 1RM Without Testing a Max Testing a true one-rep max costs recovery and carries risk. A set you have already done gives you an estimate that is good enough to program from.
• Strength Training While in a Calorie Deficit What to expect from your lifts during a fat loss phase, what to change in the programme, and which numbers you should stop chasing entirely.
• How Much Protein You Actually Need The protein range that covers almost everyone, why a calorie deficit raises it, and the one-week test that shows whether you are actually hitting it.