People aren't very good at guessing how close they are to muscle failure when doing many reps of weightlifting.
Evidence from Studies
Supporting (2)
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“Just One More Rep!” – Ability to Predict Proximity to Task Failure in Resistance Trained Persons
The study found that people who lift weights regularly are not good at guessing how many more reps they can do before failing, which matches the claim that they are poor at estimating this.
The study looked at how well people can guess how close they are to muscle failure during exercise and found they are worse at it when doing many repetitions, which matches the claim.
Contradicting (2)
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Accuracy in Estimating Repetitions to Failure During Resistance Exercise
The study shows people are actually pretty good at guessing how many more reps they can do when they're close to failure, which goes against the claim that they're bad at it.
Accuracy of Intraset Repetitions-in-Reserve Predictions During the Bench Press Exercise in Resistance-Trained Male and Female Subjects
The study found people are actually pretty good at guessing how many reps they have left before failing during weightlifting, which goes against the claim that they are bad at it.
Gold Standard Evidence Needed
According to GRADE and EBM methodology, here is what ideal scientific evidence would look like to definitively prove or disprove this specific claim, ordered from strongest to weakest evidence.