The Simplest Way to Choose the Right Weight at the Gym

I’m going to teach you how to choose the right weight in the gym as if I were explaining it to a 5 year old.

So I got this message from one of my clients and decided to make this:

Let’s get into it.

So if your goal is to lose a bit of fat, build a bit of muscle, and feel confident with your shirt off then this is what I’d recommend.

Now before we talk about which weights to choose, let’s take it back a step and look at REPS.

Most of your sets should be within the following rep ranges:

6-8

8-10

10-12

12-15

This is going to be the most practical rep ranges based on the goals we talked about earlier.

Let’s look at an example of Seated Dumbbel Shoulder Press becaue I like that exercise and we’ll take a look at the 12-15 rep range

CHOOSING THE RIGHT WEIGHT

How you choose the right weight is you choose a weight that could do for no less than 12 reps and no more than 15 reps.

For example let’s say your workouts call for 3 sets of 12-15 reps and you chose 20lb dumbbells or 40lbs total and you can do 14 reps beofre it gets extrememly difficult on your first set.

Your second set you could only get 13 reps.

And your third set you could barely squeeze out 12 reps.

In this example, you chose the PERFECT weight for these rep ranges.

HOW TO PROGRESS

Okay so you picked the right weight for this training session, but how do you progress going forward to actually build muscle?

What you do is next session you pick the exact same weight - 20lb dumbbells for 40lbs total - becasue you couldn’t max out the rep range for all of your sets in your previous session.

So you continue to use this weight until you can get 15 reps for all 3 sets.

After you can do that, the next session you increase weight by a small increment of 5lbs so now you are pressing 25lbs dumbbells or 50lbs total.

And let’s say in that session you could only get 12, 12, and 12 reps for eac of your 3 sets.

You’d continue using this weight until you can get all 15 reps for all 3 sets.

This method is called double progression and is a great way to ensure you are progressing from sesison to session and actually building muscle.

So there you have it, that’s how you choose the right weight in the gym so you can actually start to make progress.