The 5 pounds that makes a Difference

There is nothing more frustrating when it's time to figure out the weight to repetition relationship on a new program when using totally new exercises. As a trainer, I have to be efficient with the clients time, so there's not much time for guessing games. Here's a little trick I found to be useful to save time and get the right amount of reps out of my client. All you need to do is find out how many reps he can do with a given weight on the first set.

Let's say for example he did 225 pounds on the bench press for 10 reps. At this point, your second set is a set of 8 repetitions. Here is my trick, for every five pounds you add to the bar, one rep will be stripped off the initial set. So you will need to put 235 pounds for 8 reps and so forth. This trick works with most of the upper body movements (5-pound incremental per 1 rep ratio). As for the lower body, I like a 10 pound increment to repetition ratio. This is not an exact science but it did help me take out some of the guessing work involved when training my clients.