Hypertrophy I DB Percentages

[Abrar Khan]

Hello. Hope you are well.

In Hypertrophy I, there is some dumbbell pressing work with weights prescribed at 70% and 63% of e1RM. Could you tell me how you intended this to be done with an example? Because in the gym I go to, we only have fixed weight dumbbells with 5 kg increments. My e1RM is around 35 kg, so I currently do an AMRAP with 25 kg, then use 20 kg (57%~) for the following sets. Is that fine? And I imagine there would be difficulty in scaling up the weight deeper into the program. Would you recommend me to do something different given this situation? I apologise if this is been asked before, but I couldn't find it in my searches over the past 2 weeks.

Also, my muscular endurance is pretty bad. I can do a 100 kg BP any day at RPE 9-9.5. But I get too sore to do more than 10 reps with 70 kg. This is pretty much an issue with all high rep (>8) sets, more so with isolation/dumbbell work. In the 2nd sets, most of the times, I can only get about half the amount of reps I get in the first. Please shed some light on this.

Thanks a lot.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Yep, that's totally fine to approximate when you need to.

As far as muscular endurance goes, I don't think it's alarming that your 1RM is 100 and your 10RM is ~ 70. That's about right. I do think to the extent your conditioning is a limiting factor, it's likely to improve with more exposure to training that demands some level of conditioning.

[Abrar Khan]

Thanks for the hopeful words Dr. I look forward to the adaptations this block would bring.