People can't guess how many more reps they can do
“Just One More Rep!” – Ability to Predict Proximity to Task Failure in Resistance Trained Persons
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
One year of training doesn't improve accuracy in predicting muscle failure.
It contradicts the belief that experience makes you better at gauging your limits, suggesting perception and reality are often mismatched.
Practical Takeaways
Push for an extra rep or two in your sets—you might be capable of more than you think, based on the average 2-rep underestimation.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
One year of training doesn't improve accuracy in predicting muscle failure.
It contradicts the belief that experience makes you better at gauging your limits, suggesting perception and reality are often mismatched.
Practical Takeaways
Push for an extra rep or two in your sets—you might be capable of more than you think, based on the average 2-rep underestimation.
Publication
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Year
2019
Authors
C. Armes, Henry Standish-Hunt, P. Androulakis-Korakakis, Nick Michalopoulos, Tsvetelina Georgieva, Alexander Hammond, J. Fisher, P. Gentil, Jürgen Giessing, J. Steele
Related Content
Claims (6)
People who lift weights for over a year often guess wrong about how many more reps they can do before getting tired—they usually think they can do about 2 fewer than they actually can.
Even if you've been lifting weights for a year, you might still not be good at guessing how many reps you have left in the tank, because people in a study kept thinking they could do more than they actually could.
When people do strength exercises like knee extensions, how hard they think they're working doesn't always match how hard their body is actually working. Even trained athletes often think they can't do more reps when they actually could.
People aren't very good at guessing how close they are to muscle failure when doing many reps of weightlifting.
When people test how many times they can lift a weight, their performance changes from day to day. This makes it hard to predict their true ability. Using a daily adjustment method helps make the results more consistent and shows that people can actually do more reps than what standard tests suggest.