Buzz
Regardless of why you're lifting weights, your goal is the same as mine or the person next to you snapping selfies: progress. Your initial impulse might be to simply add more weight, but increasing your reps is another viable option. Let’s break down when each choice is most effective.
When it’s time to consider adding weight or increasing reps, you've already hit what fitness experts call your current 'training stimulus'—you've made progress! But as you know, the path to strength isn't always smooth sailing.
What Causes Your Training Progress to Stall
Before we dive into the 'weights or reps first' debate, let’s confront the major obstacle in the weight room: the lack of progress, or that frustrating period where your workouts feel easy, yet you're not improving or feeling stronger after some time. In fitness jargon, you’ve reached a plateau.
A plateau is what happens when the same workout routine that once boosted your strength and fitness no longer delivers the results it used to. This is usually resolved by adding more weight, more reps, or both—an easy fix for beginners. But eventually, even that won't cut it. The body adapts, and the same method won't help anymore, leading to another plateau.
Plateaus occur for a variety of reasons, many of which we've previously discussed. The main culprit? Your body being too smart. If key factors like sleep, stress management, and nutrition are already in check, there are still these possibilities to explain why plateaus might happen:
You’re not training enough: If you're lacking in effort and intensity, the volume of your training—meaning the overall work you put in—might be the issue. Most beginner programs gradually build strength with fewer exercises, sets, and reps. As a beginner, you may not yet have the capacity to handle enough work to make continuous progress. According to a study from the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, increasing work volume can help build strength and muscle, provided you can recover properly. Top athletes take years to develop this ability. Strength coach Greg Nuckols explains in a Ripped Body article: 'You can handle more work, so you can do more work, so you can reap the benefits (more size and strength) from more work.'
You’re training too much: On the flip side, you might be overtraining and not allowing enough time for your body to recover. Greg Nuckols explains: 'As you get stronger, training becomes more metabolically demanding. This leads to fatigue accumulating during workouts, which makes it hard to finish your exercises and impacts the quality of your training later. Recovery is also affected—it becomes much harder to bounce back after intense sessions where your form deteriorates and you push through the last reps each week.'
Your program is too advanced for you: This might sound backwards, but more complex programs don’t always lead to better results. The assumption is that the harder the workout, the greater the progress. But if you're new to training, your body hasn't yet mastered the basic exercises, so jumping straight into advanced methods can limit your potential to make progress when you eventually need to adjust your training to break through plateaus.
As you can see, continuous progress isn't just about adding more weight or reps. There's a lot more to think about when it comes to avoiding plateaus.
So, What Should You Focus On First: Weights or Reps?
When it comes to deciding whether to adjust your weight or reps first, the answer is clear: form should always come first.
This isn't an excuse or avoidance tactic.
Here's the reality: Good exercise form is crucial to ensuring that your muscles are effectively engaged, making your workout count, and minimizing the risk of injury. However, all of that goes out the window when you're dealing with weights that exceed your typical load. The heavier the weight, the more likely your form will break down, leading you to move with the grace of a Silverback gorilla attempting to dance on ice. While it's one thing to master movements with lighter weights (or just your body weight), it's a whole different ballgame when extra weight is added.
If maintaining your form is your top priority, and lifting beyond your usual capacity causes you to lose it, then the better option is to adjust your rep count or rep scheme first, allowing you to make progress (and yes, this is the answer!).
This concept ties into the idea of increasing your training volume—doing more work so that you're able to handle even more in the future. Greg further explains:
Increasing your weights as long as you're able to is usually a great approach. However, when you hit a plateau, it's typically necessary to reduce the weight and adjust the sets, reps, or both. This approach is flexible, as increasing volume will provide a larger stimulus if you've plateaued from insufficient effort. On the other hand, if your plateau stems from overtraining, increasing volume will boost your work capacity, which will eventually lead to more progress once you can return to adding weight. While it’s tough during this phase—your progress may slow, and fatigue may build—it will pay off when you push through and come out stronger on the other side.
This likely means you'll need to reduce the weight in your exercise to handle more reps or sets, and that's completely fine—that's actually the goal here.
Both strategies will help your body adapt to these new challenges, but what about the long-term? Be cautious about making too many changes too quickly, as that could lead to unforeseen consequences down the road.
Making Small Adjustments is Better Than Making Big Changes
While I'm not one to gamble, I'd bet you’d want to keep lifting weights, maintaining your strength and mobility, well into your later years. If so, chasing after bigger numbers could be risky. Not only does it increase the chance of injury, but it could also hinder your progress in the long run.
As fitness expert and author Lyle McDonald of Body Recomposition highlights in this insightful piece aimed at beginner trainees:
When someone dives straight into high volumes or advanced training techniques, they can encounter issues later when they need to make adjustments. If the volume is already high, trying to increase it becomes tough, if not impossible. Similarly, using advanced methods too early leaves no tools to break through plateaus when they inevitably come.
To put it another way, the ultimate goal of any training program should be to achieve the greatest improvements in performance with the least amount of training effort.
In other words, it’s wiser to make small, gradual changes rather than drastically altering everything too quickly and exhausting all your options. So, if you’re going to adjust something, do so cautiously, making only one change at a time. For this article’s context, that would mean adjusting either reps or weight, but in smaller increments. Got it?
Bringing It All Together
What does a proper adjustment look like when a workout begins to feel stale?
Greg provides some helpful suggestions in his article, recommending that when progress stalls, the first step is to adjust your repetitions. If that still doesn’t lead to progress, then try increasing the weight. Afterward, shift back to adjusting your reps, repeating the cycle. Remember, you don't have to maintain the same rep and set numbers in every workout. You can choose to follow a periodization approach, or alternate between periods of high and low reps for the same exercise.
Always remember: Our main objective is to make consistent progress and become stronger, fitter, and faster over time—whether it takes weeks, months, or years. Another benefit of first changing your reps, as Lyle highlights, is that it prevents feeling overwhelmed and keeps things achievable. This approach helps you stay consistent, making it easier to form a lasting gym habit. And that's more important than anything else.
Illustration by Nick Criscuolo.
