How Beginner Lifters Mess Up Their 1RM Attempts

Jan 19

Takeaway Points:

Testing your one rep maxes (1RM) is a way to measure strength progress, but there are a lot of wrong ways to go about them.
Attempting maxes too frequently or too soon, wasting your energy during a warm up, or not tapering/peaking beforehand, can all lead to 1RM that aren’t representative of your strength.
It’s extremely important to take proper precautions when doing 1RM because the heavier the weight, the more likely it is it’ll cause a serious injury if something goes wrong.
Remember that there are many other ways to measure strength and progress, and not meeting your goal on a 1RM is not the end of the world, nor proof that your training isn’t working.

Lifting heavy weights is the name of the game, and testing your 1RM is how you prove how much your hard work and training has paid off. But frequently, I see lifters screwing up their max attempts by approaching it all the wrong way. So, I wanted to get down some of the biggest offenders so that you can know how to do it right.

1. Attempting Maxes Too Frequently, Or Too Soon

Maxes are exciting, and for good reason. You love to see your hard work solidified into an easily quantifiable number which tells you how well you’ve done.

At the same time, this means that newer lifters often try to max out way too often, to the detriment of their normal training.

One of my favorite cringeworthy gym stories of all time involved the first gym I ever trained in as a teenager. I recently visited my parents and got to lift in my old gym again, and while I was there getting in a deadlift workout, a trainer set up with his client across the way. There, I got to witness him telling a young client (who had never lifted before) to max out on his deadlift (a lift he didn’t know at all) so that they could have a max number to use when guiding his training. The kid was stick-thin, clearly had never lifted (or worked out much at all) and looked like he was going to hernia as he lifted heavier and heavier weights. His knees flailed left and right. His back was over-flexed. Clearly, he wasn’t feeling good about it. Yet somehow, he kept trying, because his trainer kept urging him to.

Luckily he didn’t get hurt that day, but many lifters do get hurt in similar situations all the time - because they try to max out way earlier than they need to. They’re excited to attempt true 1RM’s weekly or monthly, even though this drains your energy and can throw off your normal training cycles. If your form isn’t nailed down you may be hurting yourself more than helping. Even if your form is good and you don’t hurt yourself, you’re quickly going to run out of the “noob gains” period and hit a wall - and many beginner/intermediate lifters who are used to maxing too often will then get discouraged when they hit the necessary part where results slow down and they have to buckle down for the long haul.

Experienced lifters may test their 1RM’s every 4 months or more. Many test maxes even less frequently, instead just focusing on what matters most - expending their energy on training and improving, keeping a regular schedule and allowing more consistent progress. I haven’t done a true max attempt in a year, but I’ve still been consistently improving.

One possible problem is that beginners simply aren’t aware of how many ways they can measure progress. Monthly “semi-max” RM tests, volume improvements, and biofeedback markers like RPE can all give us a way of measuring our progress without actually forcing us to waste all our energy attempting true maxes.

I’ve got clients who, starting from nothing, didn’t test their true 1RM’s for at least 8 months into their training. This didn’t stop them from seeing consistent progress, and ensured that by the time they did attempt a true 1RM, they were 100% ready and able.

2. Warming Up Improperly/Wasting Energy

The next big issue I often encounter is simply not knowing how to attempt a max properly on the day of. This is related to the fact that people simply don’t know how to warm up properly, in a general sense.

When it comes to warming up, most people expend more energy than they need to. The purpose of a warmup is twofold: 1) to generally get the circulation going and increase core body temperature a little bit, which helps with injury, stability, and energy levels (especially if coming in from cold weather outside), and 2) to prepare the body for the specific demands of the physical challenge at hand. We can refer to this as a combination of “general” and “specific” warmup.

A general warmup is not specific to the task at hand, and focuses on increasing core temperature. Typically, a short bout of cardio is recommended. This can be easily messed up by turning “a short bout of cardio” into “a longer bout of cardio which starts to dig into your energy reserves for the workout”. I used to perform vigorous 15 minute runs before my workouts - until I realized that this was half the reason my squats never had any gas to them.

A specific warmup should focus on building up not only to the exercise being warmed up for, but also the exact intensity (weight and rep range) that will be used. Common mistakes here include using a different, related lift instead of the one you want to warm up for, or using weight/rep combos which are vastly different or waste energy during the warmup.

If you want to warm up for a bench press, a pushup is inferior to simply using lighter sets on the bench. If you’re building up to say, a 1RM attempt at 225lbs, then warming up by using sets of 12 is obviously going to be wasting a lot of energy when you could be using sets of 1 or 2. Warmup sets should use purposefully easy sets at any given weight, so that you’re not wasting energy - often, I used to see people taking each warmup set to near failure, even though this just sabotaged their ability to hit their volume or weight targets for the day. The same issue is magnified when you’re talking about 1RM attempts, where you need every bit of energy you can get.

Warmups should be short and easy, and focus on building up to the task at hand. Start with a short burst of cardio, move on to short sets building up to your working weight (usually just 1-3 reps/set, avoiding training to anywhere near failure), and get ready for your max attempt.

The last problem many beginners make with warming up for maxes is not to have a proper weight in mind as their goal for the day and use way too many buildup sets, with too small of weight jumps. This can cause you to waste energy building up. Let’s explain this by taking the above example of aiming for a 225lb bench press. Let’s also say that, while the lifter doesn’t know it yet, 225 is their max for the day.

Let’s say they start off with 135x3. So far so good. 155x3. Still good. 175x2. 195x1. Still good. But here’s where they start to go off - 200x1, 205x1, 210x1, 215x1 - and by the time they’ve hit 215, they’re absolutely exhausted and fail at 220.

Taking a single rep at a near max weight may take enough out of you that you can’t go any further. So in the above example, it would have made a lot more sense for the lifter to have a goal in mind (225) and then warmed up to around 90% (200) and then just jumped straight to the 225 without attempting every weight in between. Even if the 225 didn’t go up, you may be able to succeed on a fallback attempt at 220 simply because you’ve probably wasted a bit less energy.

Having a plan is absolutely crucial. For experienced lifters who know their previous maxes or have estimated maxes based on sub-max RM tests, it’s a matter of aiming a little bit over your previous best, going for it, and then falling back to something achievable if struggling. This is harder for beginners, who may not have an idea of what to aim for since their maxes have increased so consistently and strongly, and is part of the reason beginners should often hold off on attempting true maxes.

3. Not Tapering/Peaking Beforehand

Related to the topic of maxing out too often, is not having prepared your training ahead of time to be ready for that max. The art of preparing your body for a max test comes from a taper/peak, which I’ve written about in depth elsewhere.

In essence, a peak involves upping the intensity but decreasing the volume so that you can minimize bodily fatigue while maximizing fitness for a max test. This involves about a month of steadily reducing volume on accessory lifts (a taper) leading up to a week of easy, high-specificity training to prepare you for the max test (a peak). A taper/peak can easily add quite a lot onto your maxes, while also making your training “easier”. It’s how serious lifters prepare for meets and personal bests.

This kind of planning is often unknown by beginners, or they may be too impatient to attempt it properly. However, if you want to perform your best, it’s absolutely necessary - and this is why many random “because I wanted to” max attempts fail, because they occurred in the middle of a normal training cycle when fatigue is high.

4. Not Taking Appropriate Precautions

I don’t think I should have to say that you need to be careful when maxing out to ensure that you don’t get hurt. Squatters should use safety spotter arms, or a human spotter (or, more safely, two, since the method for a single spotter on the squat is sometimes unsafe). Benchers should use a spotter, or in rare cases may be able to use spotter arms safely. The deadlift doesn’t present serious injury risk from getting trapped under the bar, but you probably don’t want anything you could fall on behind you in case you get lightheaded or pass out. With overhead, the greatest issue is bad form causing spinal issues, but you can still place spotter arms high enough to take the bar off you in case something goes terribly wrong. With Oly lifts it’s impossible to “spot”, but you definitely want to be sure that you’re practiced enough with the lift that things probably won’t go terribly wrong, and also have a clear area to lift in, in case they do.

Precautions take little to enforce, and can prevent catastrophic failure in case something goes wrong, which is much more likely to happen with heavier weights. When we look at superheavyweight equipped lifters handling 500+ pounds for multiple reps in training, they often have to train with a whole team of guys, including a minimum of 2-3 spotters at all times. Even these monsters have to play it safe - and especially these guys have to play it safe, because a loss of control can mean death when you’re talking about a heavy enough weight.

Precautions also have another important role - they enable you to really push without fear. If you’re performing a bench press and uncertain of whether you’ll be able to push out a rep, you’ll be fearful and not able to fully push yourself, for concern of being trapped under the bar. Having a spotter enables you the peace of mind to know that if you do fail, you’ll be ok, and this can give you the encouragement needed.

5. It’s Fine To Use Accessories

While there is some concern that using accessories - belt, knee sleeves, knee wraps, lifting straps - may negatively harm your strength a little in the long run due to overuse, that doesn’t apply in a situation like a max test. In this situation, you want to max out your strength as much as possible - so leaving off the use of accessories will only hold you back. Besides, you’re only using it for a short period (your max test) so it won’t have any effect in the long run.

That doesn’t mean that you should try out accessories for the very first time on your 1RM attempt. Sometimes, the change in form that a new accessory necessitates may be just enough to mess up a 1RM attempt. Knee wraps and wrist wraps, for example, can feel really weird if you’re not used to them already.

In these cases, it helps to spend a bit of time getting used to these accessories first (typically, using them a few times during your normal training sessions) so that you can be sure that there are no issues when it comes time to test your 1RM.

6. Understanding That A Single Max Test Doesn’t Mean Much

The most important skill for long-term success is learning to think in the long term - and that means that you need to accept that each individual 1RM attempt isn’t going to be very important.

Yes, you typically want to see your numbers improving somewhat consistently over time. However, you’ll find that lots of things can cause temporary minor fluctuations in your strength - a bad night of sleep, a life event that disrupts your training a bit for the month, and so on. It’s natural and expected that sometimes these negative fluctuations will cause you to fail when attempting a new max.

Over time, however, so long as your volume of training is consistently increasing (and the rest of your work feels good) you can often assume that these failures are just a fluke. Sooner or later, you’ll gain enough strength that you overcome these natural fluctuations, and you’ll be hitting PR’s again.

If you want to succeed, you can’t let any one bad month derail you. Focus instead on making volume improvements where you can, and sooner or later the strength will follow.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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