ULTIMATE GUIDE TO REPS IN RESERVE

Question from Edward Willye on Quora:

Mr. Potato, love your writing and practical views. Can you write a clarification on RIR? 0–6 RIR is too simple. If your 0 RIR set is 10, leaving 5 is too much of course. I think of it as a percent of a set to 0 RIR like you better be doing 80–90% of a 0 RIR set. And then bring your wisdom on what 0 RIR really is, how to find it, and how it changes.

Wassup, Eddie, MY BRUDDAH!

That's a really AWESOME question 'cause yeah, RIR, RPE, these scales of perceived effort are a bit tricky to grasp— the key is understanding SFR— STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO— which is the relationship between how much stimulus/work you've introduced to your workout and how much damage/fatigue went alongside— so before we thread forward, let's establish what RIR is so other people know what the fuck we’re talking about.

RIR stands for REPS IN RESERVE— it's a concept designed to measure the perceived effort introduced to a given set by evaluating how many extra repetitions would you be able to execute in that set at the point in which you decided to end it.

If at the point you finished your set you couldn't do a single extra repetition even if Alonzo Harris held that S&W 4506 right next to your head and yelled "ONE MORE REP OR I'LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT!"— that's 0 RIR, zero reps in reserve also known as FAILURE.

If at the point you finished the set you COULD do one extra rep to save your life— that's 1 RIR— 1 Rep In Reserve.

If you could do 2 reps— 2 RIR.

3 reps— 3 RIR.

4 reps... well, I think you got it, right!?

The closer you're to failure, the higher the stimulus the exercise will provide, so you'll progress faster, BUT, THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS FREE LUNCH— the faster rate of progress will also yield higher fatigue/damage generating a bigger toll on recovery that will challenge your body's sheer ability to process not only the stimulus but also all the damage.

Going pedal to the metal 247365 will only result in desensitization to stimulus— due to the law o biological accommodation— and systemic fatigue accumulation.

It's like your body is a library, every time someone takes a book off the shelves, the librarian has to process it and then put the book back into place, if too many books are taken all at once, unprocessed books will start to pile up, and the once beautifully curated shelves will start to look like swiss cheese and people simply ain't gonna be able to find everything that they need.

HAHAHA Gen Z be thinking "WTF is this dude talking about" HAHAHA

To address that, the first thing you can do is hire more librarians to ramp up the speed at which the books are processed— in the context of training that would be using a strategic and conscious approach to DIETING & SLEEP.

A kickass diet provides the resources required to process the stimulus, and adequate sleep bouts are responsible for processing the stimulus itself and clearing up the damage/fatigue allowing for further progress— it's like the old saying, it's not only about what you do in that 1 hour you spend in the gym, but what you do in the following 23hrs.

But back to our little analogy, it really doesn't matter how many librarians you've hired if you don't establish a limit to how many books people can take at once— if you allow a bunch o rascals to take your entire collection of World War II tanks off the shelves without any rules or regulations, not even Mary Poppins will be able to take care of that mess— that's when adjusting the intensity of your workouts using RIR comes in handy for you to find a proper balance of stimulus in relationship to the fatigue the workout is going to generate.

The following is a gross oversimplification 'cause to truly address the intensity of the entire workout we should be evaluating volume landmarks too, MV, MEV, MAV, and MRV, but for the sake of tackling one thing at a time, it's a good way to grasp the relationship between RIR and SFR.

• USAGES OF 10+RIR— PRIMING, TECHNIQUE WORK, DELOADS.

STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO— NONE.

10+ RIR means that at the point you've finished your set, you could still do more than 10 repetitions if you wanted to, working at this intensity can be useful to improve upon your technique without taking a toll on your body, refining the movement patterns of highly technical movements like the snatch and clean & jerk, but also their not so technical cousins, yet, surprisingly challenging for some people squat and deadlift.

This intensity is also very good for introducing PRIMING EXERCISES to your routine that aim at delivering blood to the muscles and joints that are going to be overloaded later in the workout with the goal of reducing the risk of injury by using 20-30 repetitions and 10+ RIR in exercises that work the same joints and muscles as the primary movements.

10+RIR is also a desirable threshold for when you're DELOADING, a phase in your training where you reduce all volume and intensity metrics with the goal of allowing your body to get resensitized to stimulus.

To identify 10+ RIR, by the end of your set you're not feeling any muscle disruption whatsoever, no pump, no burn, no reduced strength, repetitions remain steady from the start to finish of the set, a qualitative landmark to look for when working at this range, is improved quality of movement, improved stability, and fewer clicks and pops throughout the range of motion signaling that the aforementioned blood supply to the joints and muscles actually occurred.

• USAGES OF 10-7 RIR— MAINTENANCE, GREASING THE GROOVES & TECHNIQUE WORK.

STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO — MINIMAL

You can work the same muscles at this threshold pretty much daily.

10-7 RIR is an optimal range to be used at MAINTENANCE, the thing is, unless you're an utter beginner, you can't improve at everything all at once, like aforementioned, we have LIMITED RESOURCES— a limited amount of progress that our bodies can do at one time, so when you're pushing some body parts HARD, it's intelligent to put other body parts in the back burner.

What people often fail to realize is that all these structures getting challenged naturally decay when they're not consistently trained, let's say your deadlift 1RM is 187kg— if you go to the gym and hit 2 sessions of necromancy using 5 sets of 5 with 120kg focusing on pristine, powerful execution, it's more than enough stimulus to KEEP your strength at that level— and not only that, you'll improve coordination and the technique itself and also give a nice stimulus to all that soft tissue— GREASING THE GROOVES they call it— potentially even increasing your strength in the movement not by increasing your central nervous system's sheer ability to recruit more motor units, 'cause indeed, that's not enough stimulus for the CNS, nor by adding any extra slabs of lean beef to your frame but by improving your leverages and the quality of the execution of the movement.

• USAGES OF 6-4 RIR— SLOW & STEADY PROGRESS.

STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO — LOW

If you seek SLOW AND STEADY PROGRESS, you can go for 4-6 reps in reserve— You might need to take a day off between sessions for your muscles to optimally recover and you don't experience impacts on performance, but working at this intensity allows for high frequency up to work the same muscles 3 to 4 times a week and sparse deloads every 12-16 weeks.

To identify 4-6 RIR, it's that point where the lift starts to lose speed, it's not really all that challenging to finish the repetition but you can feel the movement is slowing down and soon if you keep going things will get pretty grindy.

Since I do most of my lifting alone in my living room, I can't afford to fail my lifts, and since my schedule these days is borderline insane, I need my workouts to be 45-60mins tops— so my go-to range is 4-6 RIR so I can keep my rest times at 2-3 minutes, 'cause the more you tax the central nervous system, the more rest between sets you'll need.

With this exact approach, which some dufus online will perceive as not enough "hard work"—I've managed to bring 5RM on my squat back to 1.7x my bodyweight my bench to 1.4x my bodyweight, and my deadlift to 2.5x my bodyweight.

I'm at 170 lbs right now, and I know that's not impressive in the online world, but in real life, I feel pretty good about those numbers.

• USAGES OF 3-1 RIR — OPTIMAL STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO.

STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO — CONSIDERABLE TO HIGH.

When working with 3-1 reps in reserve, you'll have to take a strategic approach to programming 'cause the muscles worked at this range, assuming you're using a decent volume of training, are going to need somewhere between 2-3 days to fully recover depending on your work capacity.

The reality is, most motherfuckers out there are not experienced enough or are simply delusional; they thought they were going to failure when in reality they were at 3-1 RIR.

3-2 reps in reserve are NO JOKE, bar speed is reduced significantly, these repetitions will feel GRINDY AS HELL, and experience plays a big role here, beginners when they're working at this range usually get afraid of getting stapled and finish the set thinking they ain't got another rep in them, when in reality, more often than not they have a bunch extra reps in the tank.

But don't hear what I'm not saying, this is potentially the zone in which OPTIMAL GAINZ are going to be made because it'll push your body towards the limits of its capabilities without absolutely demolishing it.

• USAGES OF 0 RIR — GOING TO FAILURE.

STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO — HIGHER FATIGUE THAN STIMULUS.

Let's give TRUE FAILURE the respect it fucking deserves, and make a distinction between compound movements with free weights, compound movements with machines, and isolation exercises.

Compound movements with free weights will recruit a plethora of muscles of different strengths and require YOU to stabilize the movement hence failure should be TECHNICAL FAILURE— when your form breaks down and you can't maintain a neutral spine, use the full range of motion of the movement, complete a repetition with control not adding tons of momentum in the transition between the eccentric and concentric portions of the lift, or execute the movement using your entire body as a unit— for example, turning a squat into a wonky goodmorning variation where you first lift your butt up and then use your lower back to finish the movement— THAT'S FAILURE— THAT'S 0 RIR, 'cause even though you could push through a compromised position to crank a bunch of extra ugly-ass repetitions, with every extra rep one of the weaker links of the system might get exposed and bite you in the ass.

Compound movements with machines usually offer differing degrees of EXTERNAL STABILIZATION— machines that offer lower degrees of external stabilization like a smith-machine press or squat, will still require you to be attentive to TECHNICAL FAILURE, while other machines like a chest-supported T-bar row or a lat-pulldown, which are still compound movements, will yield enough external support for you to reach MUSCULAR FAILURE— the point in which the temperature of the primary muscles involved in the movement get so high, that the brain shuts its ability to generate contractions off.

The same is true for pretty much every single ISOLATION EXERCISE— the vast majority of them allows for muscular failure.

I usually love to use CONCENTRATION CURLS as a way to explain muscular failure so people can understand that what stops the contraction isn't an overwhelming pressure, or destruction of the muscle through the metabolic stress of the movement— although yeah, you'll need to learn how to grind through the pain of high repetition work in other movements like lateral raises— it's just temperature, concentration curls usually simply stop way before you're even feeling it burn, you just can't crank another rep.

Now that we've covered the distinctions between different types of failure, as aforementioned, let's give going to failure some FUCKING RESPECT.

Yes, you can be under-rested, malnourished, underslept, stressed the fuck out with your bills, and resting 30 seconds between sets, and theoretically, you're indeed going to failure, you can't do a single extra repetition in that given set, but in that stupid context, you're also not really challenging your bodies capabilities in the domains of strength and size other than potentially metabolic conditioning.

In the domains of strength, you're introducing the dreaded JUNK VOLUME.

TRUE FAILURE requires you to be fresh, at your strongest, resting appropriately, eating right, sleeping right, AT PEAK PERFORMANCE— not necessarily PEAKED, but at your very best at that point in the training cycle— and then you push your body towards the limit.

You reach 6-4 RIR where the bar starts to slow down, and keep going.

You grind through the 3-1 RIR grunting like an utter savage, you feel pressure everywhere, especially in the head, and by conjuring your demons from the past, you grind through one last fucking rep and rerack.

You might see stars, you might wanna puke, you might reevaluate why the fuck you decided to go that fucking far— but more often than not, especially if it's a PR, it's almost impossible not to celebrate in some way, shape, or form.

That's what going to failure really is.

So be strategic about it, understand that this game isn't about bashing your head against the wall every single workout, but leveraging all the fucking tools in the toolbox so you can keep your training fun and consistent— there's a time to go to failure, there's a time to stay the fuck away from it— if you manage to STAY ON THE IRON PATH, THY GIFT OF GAINZ SHALL BE BESTOWED UPON YOU!

AND PRAISE BRODIN TO THAT, MY BRUDDAH

BANG IRON!

Big KISS

THE POTATO MAN

Hi guys, I'm going through a bit of a rough patch, I’m still at that scrappy initial stages ya feel me— if you want to help me keep helping other people STAY ON THE IRON PATH, please, consider a paid subscription to this substack so I can keep producing content for you guys, yo, thx for reading this anyways, means a lot to me.

BANG IRON, MY BRUDDAH!