warm up question.

victoriannsays

So, yesterday as I was preparing to bench press 90lbs.. I did my warm up sets as usual, but when I went to load up the bar for my work sets I accidentally put on 100lbs instead. I got on the bench and lifted the 100lbs pounds 1x and thought to myself oh *kitten* this is heavier than I remembered.. I checked and found the mistake I had made, took off the extra plates and started my sets with the 90. I found the 90 to be much easier than expected and didn't miss any reps(struggled with 85lbs for awhile.)

My question is - is it possible that my accidental 1 rep at 100lbs make my work sets "easier"? Would it be okay to do this again?

Sarauk2sf

Ooop - sorry, just noticed that this was overlooked. Apologies.

If you lift a heavier weight, you will fatigue yourself that little bit more. However, the lower weight probably felt lighter at first as it was lighter than you just lifted, plus you had a bit of a wait presumably while you changed out the plates, so you had recovered a bit. What it suggests to me was that you had made progress and so was able to do the heavier weight. Lifting a heavier weight and then dropping down will generally not make the usual working set easier, and in fact will often make it harder than it would have been due to the extra fatigue.

I would not recommend employing it as a standard protocol going forward as you may end up not being able to finish the reps in the set when you get to heavier weights, which will be detrimental in the long run.

Chief_Rocka

I wouldn't recommend it for most people, but I did hear a ridiculously strong former MFPer say that he used to something like this with barbell rows.

I think the lesson here is that confidence/focus etc. play a bigger role in what you can lift than we sometimes think.

victoriannsays

No problem! I was thinking it was more of a psychological thing myself. Tried 100 again the other day and felt like a weakling lol thanks

Sarauk2sf

Locking so we can keep track of active threads. If you wish for the thread to be unlocked should you have further questions, please feel free to PM either myself or SideSteel, including a link to this thread and we will unlock it so you can pose them.