Four weeks into a new program, right around the time the trees on Mount Royal start to turn, something odd happens. The dumbbells that felt heavy in the first week of September now feel like the wrong ones. You finish a set of goblet squats, put the 25 down, and suspect you could have kept going for a while.
Most people do one of two things at this point. They stay on the 25 for another three months because nobody told them to move, or they grab the 40 because they’re feeling good and spend the next set folding forward with their heels coming off the floor. Both are mistakes, and the second one is how backs get tweaked in October.
There’s a rule for when to add weight. It’s old and dull, and it works.
Earn the weight with reps first
Pick a rep range instead of a single number. Eight to twelve is a good one for most lifts. Start with a weight you can move for three sets of eight with a couple of reps still in the tank, and from there your only job each session is to add a rep somewhere. Three sets of eight becomes nine, eight, eight. Then nine, nine, eight. It’s slow and it looks like nothing on paper.
When all three sets reach twelve, and the twelfth rep looks like the first, you’ve earned the next weight. Go up, drop back to eight reps, and start climbing again.
Coaches call this double progression: reps first, then load. I like it because it removes the decision. You don’t have to judge how you feel on a given Tuesday or whether today is a strong day. The log tells you. Either the reps are there or they aren’t.
A close cousin is the two-for-two rule from strength coaching textbooks. If you can do two reps more than your target on the last set, two sessions in a row, the weight goes up. Same idea, slightly faster trigger. Use whichever one you’ll remember.
How much to add
The smallest jump the gym will give you.
On a barbell, that usually means a 2.5 lb plate on each side, so five pounds total. With dumbbells it’s the next pair on the rack, which in most gyms is five pounds heavier per hand. Five pounds sounds like nothing. On a squat or a deadlift it mostly is nothing, and you can often take ten.
On smaller lifts the same jump is enormous. Going from 10 lb dumbbells to 15s on a lateral raise is a 50 percent increase, and no shoulder adapts that fast. For lifts like that, stretch the rep range before you move. Work up to fifteen reps, even eighteen, then take the heavier pair and expect to land back around eight. If the heavier pair gives you five ugly reps, it’s too soon. Put them back.
People skip small jumps because small jumps feel like a lack of ambition. Do the arithmetic, though. Five pounds a month on a squat is sixty pounds in a year, and most adults who start training would be thrilled with that.
What a real rep looks like
None of this works if the reps get worse as the numbers go up. A rep counts when it matches the ones before it: same depth, same speed on the way down, no bounce at the bottom, no swing to get it started.
The most common cheat I see is range of motion quietly shrinking. Squats get a little higher every week. Push-ups stop a little further from the floor. Rows turn into a shrug with some help from the hips. The log says progress while the body does less work each session. If you’re not sure, film one set from the side on your phone and compare it to a set from a month earlier. It takes a minute and it’s usually humbling.
Lowering speed is the other one. Take about two seconds on the way down, every rep. If the weight is dropping instead of being lowered, the set was too heavy to count.
Why the first month lies to you
Early gains come fast, and they have less to do with muscle than you’d think. In the first several weeks of strength training, most of the improvement is your nervous system getting better at the movement: better coordination, and more of the muscle you already have switching on at the right time. That’s why a weight can go from hard to easy in three weeks.
It doesn’t last. Somewhere in the second or third month the easy jumps dry up, a rep a week becomes a rep every two weeks, and people decide the program stopped working. It didn’t. That slower pace is what real progress looks like from then on, and it’s the pace you’ll be working at for years.
When a lift stalls
If you’ve failed to add a single rep on a lift for three sessions running, don’t push harder. Look at the boring things first. Sleep under six hours. Skipped meals. Four hard sessions crammed into five days, or a rough stretch at work. One of those is nearly always the answer.
If the boring things check out, take about 10 percent off the weight, build back up over two or three weeks, and you’ll usually go past the old sticking point. Changing the whole program is the last resort, and it’s the one people reach for first.
Write it down
A cheap notebook or the notes app on your phone. Date, exercise, weight, reps for each set. That’s the whole system.
I’d call this the one non-negotiable in strength training. Without a log you’re relying on memory, and memory is generous. You’ll remember twelve reps when it was ten, and you’ll pick the same weights you used in September all the way to Christmas.
HIIT days don’t need the same bookkeeping. Progress there shows up as more work inside the same intervals, and adding load is rarely the point.
I’ve coached clients in Montreal and online since 2021. If you’d like a program with the progressions already built in, the Connect page is the place to start.
Leave a Reply