Question about weight on the bar in The Bridge

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hi there,

I’m currently running the Bridge and going into week 6. I think this question could apply to other templates as well. Before I started The Bridge, I downloaded the Google Sheets spreadsheet from the Barbell Medicine Facebook page to track my progress. As you know the spreadsheet auto-calculates the weight for each exercise and set depending on what you enter for your first set. I’ve been doing my best not to let these numbers dictate my workout and only use them as a guide and really focus on doing my best to gauge RPE but for the most part, the numbers seem pretty close. One thing I noticed that it does, though, is that it reduces the weight on repeated sets at the max RPE for a particular exercise. For instance, my squat workout last Monday was:

4@6
4@7
4@8
4@8
4@8

My 4@6 was 260
My 4@7 was 280
My 4@8 was 295

then the spreadsheet auto-calculates a reduced weight for the last two sets which were:

4@8 - 280
4@8 - 265

Now I know that we are supposed to be gauging our RPE individually for each set, which I am doing and these reduced weights seem to keep me at the correct RPE whereas if I stuck to the 295 I would be at RPE 9 then maybe RPE 10 for the last set one. The issue is that I read somewhere on the site or in the forum that we should do our best to keep the weights the same across the higher RPE sets. This wouldn’t work in my case.

Am I overthinking this? Is it ok to reduce the weight if I need to keep the RPE on track? If I do reduce the weight, am I sabotaging my gains? For what it’s worth, based on the top sets of each exercise, my 1RM is improving pretty much each workout.

Thanks and I apologize for the lengthy post.

2

Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the post, and it sounds like your work on the Bridge is going quite well. Keep in mind that BBM has only posted the PDF download of the Bridge 1.0. Any other spreadsheets out there were build by users, and for virus reasons, we do not use things like this on the Bridge. This illustrates one. Our templates do not auto-calculate the next weight for you, and we encourage you to go by RPE for the session. If you need to lower the weight for an repeated set @8, then you can certainly do that. But you don’t always need to do so, and for many people, going from 295 to 265 marks a drop that takes them lower than a tree RPE 8. But when you do need to lower the weight some to maintain the RPE 8, you can do so. 3-5% is usually enough.

3

Thanks Leah. I appreciate the response and all the work done by the Barbell Medicine crew.