I have a weightlifting spreadsheet with weight on the vertical axis and reps on the horizontal axis. The value of each cell is the estimated 1 rep max if I accomplish that lift. In theory if my e1RM is 100kg then I can lift any permutation of (weight,reps) that have the same e1RM. This is akin to knowing Pareto Frontier of my current strength.
I use conditional formatting to color cells according to the probability that I can lift them—if I lifted 50kg for 10 reps then I can definitely do 50kg for 9 reps, so that cell is green. But if e1RM(50,10) > e1RM(40,15) then I can probably do that too so it's light green. The visualization naturally becomes Pareto-like.
If I'm feeling strong I can aim for higher weight, lower reps. Or if I'm feeling weak I can close out a (weight, reps) that's below my current e1RM but I haven't accomplished yet. The end result is that I'm always "accomplishing" some sort of PR no matter how I feel.
I wrote this app as a SPA! It uses a curve formulation similar to Brzycki, except I added a “shape” parameter (an exponent gamma between 0 and 1) that slopes the 1rm downwards at the right side.
My main finding for “pick whatever weight you want today” was that picking a lot of different weights made the curve less identifiable, so my latest iteration encourages you to pick a ladder for a few sentinel exercises per mesocycle in order to improve the statistical power. In addition, strength improves more quickly at >80% of 1RM, and hypertrophy depends on proximity to failure, so if you pick a lower weight, you really need to go to failure, which burns you out for the rest of your session, where leaving 1-2 reps in reserve is probably sufficient for hypertrophy and leaves a lot more gas in the tank for the rest of the session. Definitely open to suggestion/discussion here.
<a href="https://curvefit.app" rel="nofollow">https://curvefit.app (it runs on Cloudflare free tier, so I won’t have to start running ads or charging until I hit a couple thousand users)
There’s no particular reason it’s not OSS, but my main interest is collecting a lot of data on different athletes and publishing original research. Most weightlifting studies are small n and over a short amount of time. My particular interest is how volume, load, and fatigue are related to strength, endurance, and compliance over time. My intention is to run it for a while, look at the data to generate some hypotheses, pre-register them, then run some experiments (and by that I mean just keep collecting data). If someone else was particularly interested in this goal, I would definitely invite them to the project. That’s why it was important for me to design it to be hosted for just the cost of the domain name, because I don’t really intend to make money from it, I’m just interested in the data.
Whitespace · · focus · HN ↗
I use conditional formatting to color cells according to the probability that I can lift them—if I lifted 50kg for 10 reps then I can definitely do 50kg for 9 reps, so that cell is green. But if e1RM(50,10) > e1RM(40,15) then I can probably do that too so it's light green. The visualization naturally becomes Pareto-like.
If I'm feeling strong I can aim for higher weight, lower reps. Or if I'm feeling weak I can close out a (weight, reps) that's below my current e1RM but I haven't accomplished yet. The end result is that I'm always "accomplishing" some sort of PR no matter how I feel.
I call this e1RM Bingo.
jerkstate · · focus · HN ↗
My main finding for “pick whatever weight you want today” was that picking a lot of different weights made the curve less identifiable, so my latest iteration encourages you to pick a ladder for a few sentinel exercises per mesocycle in order to improve the statistical power. In addition, strength improves more quickly at >80% of 1RM, and hypertrophy depends on proximity to failure, so if you pick a lower weight, you really need to go to failure, which burns you out for the rest of your session, where leaving 1-2 reps in reserve is probably sufficient for hypertrophy and leaves a lot more gas in the tank for the rest of the session. Definitely open to suggestion/discussion here.
<a href="https://curvefit.app" rel="nofollow">https://curvefit.app (it runs on Cloudflare free tier, so I won’t have to start running ads or charging until I hit a couple thousand users)
fudged71 · · focus · HN ↗
jerkstate · · focus · HN ↗