When do you increase your lifting weight?

Baldie

How often would you increase your lifting weight, even if it's just by the smallest amount? Would you try and increase your lifting weight every workout, or would you stay at the same weight for a week or so and then increase the weight?

Colm_OReilly

The default progression is ot increase the weight every workout by manageable amounts as long as you're maintaning correct form. Once you stall, you move onto to a different progression.

Baldie

Colm_OReilly wrote: »

The default progression is ot increase the weight every workout by manageable amounts as long as you're maintaning correct form. Once you stall, you move onto to a different progression.

Would this be the general opinion of everyone so?

farva

Depends what your goals are, I'm no expert and can only speak for myself but generally speaking I increase my weights when my target amount of reps are getting "too easy".

I'll give you an example of my benching, I do a warmup of 12 reps at about 40/50kgs and then 4 sets of 8 reps at 82.5kg. But when I was on 80kgs and found that I was pushing out 9/10 reps per set I upped my weight to 82.5kgs. I'd say that I'll be upping it to 85kg in a couple of weeks when I'm achieving sets of 8 reps at 82.5 easy enough.

But when I'm going for my absolute max on the bench I'm only looking to do 1 full rep so if I can do 2 or 3 reps I'll up the weight. I did 2 reps at 105kg last night, so in a week or 2 I'll try for 110kg. So thats kinda what I mean about when the amount of reps gets "too easy", if you get me?

siochain

some famous coach once said, ‘Yard by Yard it's hard. Inch by inch it's a cinch!’ all of the above is right, listen to what your body is telling you, little by little increase the weight or reps. But do not sacrifice form, form is king. Ever time you visit the gym be aiming to push yourself further,

WHIP IT!

siochain wrote: »

‘Yard by Yard it's hard. Inch by inch it's a cinch!’ ... Ever time you visit the gym be aiming to push yourself further.

You should make that yoir sig Siochain - good line... will keep it in mind.

rubadub

I try and increase the reps, which is a similar concept. I aim for 8-12 reps. I choose a weight I can get 8 reps with, then after several sessions I might be up to 12reps, then I increase the weight so I am back to 8 again.

If you are working in lower rep ranges it might be a better idea to increase the weight a little. i.e. for a given weight to get from 3 reps to 4, is a bigger step than going from 10 to 11. It is a bigger % increase in strength.