How to Use Reps in Reserve to Set Your Load

Rating a set is only half the method. The other half is what you do with the rating: reps in reserve is a feedback loop, and the correction happens on the very next set. Enter what you just did to see the load it implies.

The loop, in four steps

1. Set the target for the exercise that day — say two reps in reserve on your working sets.
2. Pick a starting load from last session’s record or from an estimated max.
3. Do the set and rate it. How many more reps could you have completed with clean technique?
4. Correct. More left than planned, the weight goes up. Fewer left, it comes down. The plan is the effort, not the number on the plates.

Targets by goal

The review that brought this scale into mainstream programming gives concrete ranges:

• Hypertrophy — mostly 6 to 12 reps at 0 to 2 reps in reserve. On main lifts like squats and bench press, staying at 2 to 4 in reserve avoids muscle damage that would cut the volume you manage on later sets. Save true failure for the final set of an isolation exercise, where the fatigue cost is lowest.
• Muscular endurance — sets of 12 reps and up at 0 to 1 in reserve, with rest kept under two minutes. Training to failure appears to help here more than it does for size.
• Maximal strength — 1 to 6 reps at 80 to 100% of max. Some work at genuine failure belongs in the plan for specificity, but making it routine is associated with hormonal markers of overreaching without any strength advantage over stopping one or two reps short.
• Power — for fast, light work the rating is used as a ceiling: if you can accurately count reps in reserve, the bar is too heavy for that purpose. Heavy power work above 80% sits at 2 to 3 in reserve.

The same load, several ways to reach it

Because effort and percentage describe the same set, they interchange. At about 83% of maximum — roughly a 6 rep max — all of these are the same bar: 6 reps at 0 in reserve, 5 reps at 1, 4 reps at 2, or 3 reps at 3. That is useful when a lifter arrives flat and cannot hit the planned rep count: hold the effort, drop a rep, and the session’s intent survives.

The two systems also stack. A prescription of “3 × 10 at RPE 8 to 9, meaning 2 or 1 reps in reserve” tells the lifter both what to do and when the load was wrong, which a naked percentage never does.

Across a training block

Target ratings usually drift down as a block progresses: more reps in reserve early, when the goal is accumulating volume cheaply, and fewer in the last weeks before a planned deload. The scale makes that progression explicit instead of leaving it to how motivated you feel that day.

See what each rating means on the reps in reserve scale, how it lines up with effort scores on RIR vs RPE, and the load percentages behind it on the RPE to percentage chart.

This content is informational and does not replace coaching.