How much weight should you start with?

The short answer

Pick a weight where the last two reps are hard but nothing about the movement changes. Your speed slows a little. Your back does not round, your knees do not cave in, and you do not start throwing the weight to get it moving.

If you can do the prescribed reps and feel like you could do five more, it is too light. If your technique falls apart on rep four, it is too heavy. Everything in between is fine, and the bottom of that range is a better place to start than the top.

Start lighter than feels right

The first few weeks of lifting are not about the number on the bar. They are about teaching your body a movement pattern it will repeat thousands of times. A squat learned badly at 40 kilos is a squat you will have to unlearn at 80.

There is also a practical reason. Strength goes up fastest at the start, faster than at any later point in your training life. If you begin at the edge of what you can manage, you have nowhere to go and no way to tell whether you are progressing. If you begin light, the next eight weeks are a straight line upward, and that line is the thing that keeps people coming back.

For most barbell lifts, the empty bar is a legitimate starting weight. It is 20 kilos, which is more than it looks. For dumbbells, start with a pair you could comfortably do twelve reps with, then use them for eight.

How to judge a set after you have done it

Coaches use a scale of effort, usually one to ten, where ten means you could not have done another rep. It sounds vague and it is surprisingly reliable once you have used it a handful of times.

• Around 6: you finished with three or four reps left in you. Right for your first two or three weeks.
• Around 7 to 8: two reps left, maybe one. Right for most working sets after that.
• 9 or 10: nothing left. Useful occasionally, not weekly, and never while you are still learning the movement.

The number matters less than the habit of asking. Rate the set the moment it ends, before you talk yourself into a different memory of it.

When to add weight, and how much

Add weight when the last rep of your last set feels roughly like the first rep did. Not when a week has passed, and not because the plan says so.

• Upper body: 2.5 kilos, or the smallest pair up.
• Lower body: 5 kilos.

That looks slow. Five kilos a fortnight on a squat is 130 kilos a year, which is not going to happen, but it illustrates the point: small jumps compound faster than big ones, because you never have to take a step back.

If you add weight and your form changes, you have your answer. Take the jump back off, do another week, try again.

Three things not to do

• Do not test your maximum. There is nothing to learn from it in your first year, and it is the single most likely way to hurt yourself. The heaviest set you should do is the one your plan asked for.
• Do not add weight every session. Progress is not linear even at the start, and forcing it turns a good week into a bad month.
• Do not match the person next to you. You have no idea how long they have been doing this, and neither does anyone watching you.

What OneMore does about it

It asks how the set felt, in one tap or one word, and remembers. The next time that exercise comes round, the weight you used and the effort you reported are both on screen before you start, so the decision is a comparison rather than a guess.

It also counts the reps out loud so you are not tracking two things at once, and it tells you when the last reps of a set slowed against the first ones. That is usually the honest version of the answer you were about to give yourself.