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How to Choose the Right Weight

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Not sure what weight to pick off the rack? It's a simple enough question and it's one that is crucial to seeing the gains you want. Get it wrong and you will be either be under-challenging yourself and making no progress, or over stretching yourself risking injury and pain.

Get it right however and you can see improvements quickly and ensure that your time exercising is working towards the goals you want to achieve.

To a large extent, figuring out how much your muscles can handle is a process of trial and error. You don't want to go too light and avoid the effort needed to build muscles and you don't want to go too heavy and have to swing the weights and risk bad form.

In fact it is proper form (the correct and safe way to perform an exercise) that is key to working out if you are using the best weight for the exercise you're doing.

What is 'Proper Form'?

When you are lifting a weight, most of the time you are wanting to work one or two muscles or a chain of muscles working together in a specific movement. For example, the classic bicep curl involves the bicep muscles bending the elbow joint to lift a weight towards your shoulder. Now you could get that weight up to the shoulder by swinging your whole arm, bending and then extending your legs to get some momentum behind the up-swing and let physics do its job. While this would get the weight to where it needs to be (and you could do this with a heavier weight) a whole bunch of other muscles have been used and you are not fully training the intended muscle - the bicep.

Using proper form will help to isolate the muscle(s) you're wanting to train and at the same time, let you know if the weight you are using is appropriate to challenge the muscle(s). Next time you're doing a bicep curl, go and stand against a wall and press your back into the wall while you curl. This will help to eliminate any swinging of your body and you will see how much harder the exercise is without your back and core muscles helping you out.

In fact, maintaining the same stability in most other exercises (back flat, shoulders back and down, level hips, braced core and neutral head alignment) will help your form enormously.

Picking the best weight

A classic reps and sets combination is 10 repetitions of an exercise repeated in three sets. So, going back to our bicep curl, you would curl the bar or dumbbell 10 times before resting for a while and then repeating two more sets of 10 reps, making three sets in total.

If the last couple of reps of that first set are moderately difficult (it's a challenge but you're not straining) then this is likely to be a good weight for your current level of strength. By the end of the final third set, those last few reps should be really challenging but you're still able to maintain good form.

If you find that you are having to 'cheat' or break form, then you are advised to drop to a slightly lighter weight.

On the other hand, if you are able to complete all the sets easily, then the weight needs to be increased.

When you can get to the last rep of the last set with relative ease, then it's time to increase the weight and start over again. This is referred to as progressive overload and is the key way you can achieve muscle gains.

When selecting a weight, leave your ego behind and select the weight that is going to challenge you in a safe way. Never put your health or safety at risk just because you feel you want to be seen lifting heavy - it's never worth the risk.
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