When to add weight to the bar

Add weight when you hit every target rep at your current weight, and the last set did not feel like a maximum effort. Otherwise repeat the weight and beat your rep count. That's the whole rule. Everything below is why it works and what it looks like on a real log.

The rule has a name

Two variables, moved one at a time. Reps climb to a target, then weight takes one step and reps reset. Lifters call it double progression, and its virtue is that it progresses on evidence instead of on the calendar. Programs that add 5 lb every Monday regardless of what happened last Monday eventually write checks your recovery can't cash.

The step is a fixed grid, not a percentage. Five pounds if you count in pounds, or one 2.5 kg plate pair if you count in kilos. Percentages produce numbers like 233.7 lb, and there is no such bar.

26 days of my own bench

Here is my actual log from May and June, four working sets each session:

Twenty-five pounds in five steps, one grid step each. Nothing clever happened in there. No peaking block, no percentages, no spreadsheet.

Read the rep column rather than the weight column. It walks down: 10, then 8, then 7, then 6, and it stays at 6. That descent is the whole mechanism. Every jump gets paid for in reps, and the sessions where the reps stop falling are the ones where you actually absorbed the last jump. June 16 and June 21 look identical on paper, four clean sets of six, and five pounds apart. That is not a plateau. It's what progress looks like from close up.

Then look at June 26. The last set was a five. Under the rule, 255 stays until all four sets hit six, because a weight you finished three times out of four is a weight you haven't finished.

The part most programs skip

Double progression has one blind spot. It counts reps, and reps are not the same as cost. You can grind out your last target rep with your face purple and your spotter's fingers under the bar, and a pure rep counter will cheerfully hand you five more pounds next session.

So the second half of the rule is effort. If the sets that earned the jump were a maximal effort, hold the weight instead. In Reps that is four chips after the lift, Easy through Failed, and an average above a 7 on a 10-point scale holds you where you are.

Four options rather than ten is deliberate. Hackett and colleagues had 81 lifters guess how many reps they had left, then took the set to failure to check. Close to failure, people were accurate to about a rep. Seven to ten reps out, the error grew past two reps, and training experience didn't rescue it. A ten-point scale spends most of its range in the region where your own reading is a guess.

Three things that quietly break the rule

Resting too little. Cut rest short and you'll miss reps you had the strength for, then correctly conclude the weight is too heavy. Schoenfeld and colleagues ran 21 trained men through eight weeks at one minute versus three minutes of rest, everything else identical. The three-minute group finished with more strength on both squat and bench. The rule reads your reps, so anything that steals reps corrupts it. The numbers, and when they're wrong for you, are on how long to rest between sets.

Moving the target. Eight reps this week and five next week isn't double progression, it's two unrelated workouts. Pick a target and let it stand until the weight moves.

Counting a good day as a trend. One session where everything felt light is not permission to skip a step. The rule already rewards that session, by letting you hit your reps and move up.

What to do tomorrow

Look at your last session for one lift. Did every set hit the target? Was the last one short of a maximum effort? Then add one grid step. If you missed a rep anywhere, do the same weight again and beat the number.

That's it. The full rule set Reps runs, including what happens after time off and what happens when you stall three times, is written out on how Reps decides your next set.