Testing for rep maxes.

[Sci]

Soon I will be peaking in terms of my maxes, and finishing my current HST cycle. My question is, what is the best way to test for my maxes? Should I test them all at one workout? Seems that may be a bit taxing. My original plan is to use the week before my SD to test my maxes. Should I test my 15rm on workout one, my 10rm on workout 2, and my 5rm on workout 3? Or should I reverse this? Or just test my 15rm and then calculate the rest? What has worked best for you?

 

[Sci]

I found the answer by digging through the HST FAQ e-book. Bryan recommends:
test my 15rm on workout one, my 10rm on workout 2, and my 5rm on workout 3.

 

[Jester]

I actually used to do it in reverse order. The first time I tried it, doing 15s made me infi sore again after 4 weeks of heavy.

 

[mikeynov]

Soon I will be peaking in terms of my maxes, and finishing my current HST cycle. My question is, what is the best way to test for my maxes? Should I test them all at one workout? Seems that may be a bit taxing. My original plan is to use the week before my SD to test my maxes. Should I test my 15rm on workout one, my 10rm on workout 2, and my 5rm on workout 3? Or should I reverse this? Or just test my 15rm and then calculate the rest? What has worked best for you?

You could exhaustively test for all the individual maxes, but if you get RM's in the ~3-10 range on a single day, you should be able to infer most of the values reasonably well.

Guidelines:

90% 1 RM = ~3 rep max
85% 1 RM = ~5 rep max
80% 1 RM = ~6-8 rep max
75% 1 RM = ~8-10 rep max
70% 1 RM = ~10-12 rep max
65% 1 RM = ~12-15 rep max

These numbers seem reasonably consistent in my own training, so I'd honestly just set the 15's to ~65% of your projected max, 10's to ~75% of your projected max, and 5's to ~85% of your projected max for each two week block. If you notice that you're slightly off course (over or under) you can simply adjust the weights as you go along, since the trend is obviously (strategic deconditioning) --> (frequent training with rapidly escalating loads and adequate volume to drive hypertrophy), and the particulars of that (i.e. whether you're getting 15 or 13 or whatever at the end of the 15's) are somewhat less important.

 

[Totentanz]

Out of laziness or whatever, I only ever test ~5 RMs, I don't usually find an exact 5 RM, usually it's somewhere in the region, and then I extrapolate from there as Mikey suggested. Or on some lifts, I just do max singles and extrapolate from there.

 

[Sci]

Thanks for the input guys, lots of ways to skin that cat I guess. I will use that chart Mike posted to at least start with a guess. But I really want to test my maxes this cycle. Call it 'mentzeresque' HIT addiction, or simple masochism, but I just love to go to near failure and test my strength limits every once in awhile.