Questions regards to the 12 week strength template

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1

Hello guys, I just started doing the 12 week strength template, and I have couple of questions regards to it.

  1. for the log part of the excel sheet, do I have to enter the warm up sets in there?
  2. what does the fatigue percentage mean?

Thanks in advance

2

  1. No, only enter in working sets. Basically every set RPE 7 and up. The one exception is some sets of your 5x5 in the first weeks may wind up below a 7, log those anyways.

  2. Fatigue is the amount of e1RM creep you had between sets. So if you squatted a weight at 8, then repeated that weight and got an 8.5, if you reference an RPE chart you would see your e1RM went down about 2.5% between sets, thus you had 2.5% fatigue. This can give some insight into how you’re recovering in between sets. I wouldn’t read too much into it though. Some fatigue creep is going to happen, personally I think as you start approaching around something like 10% fatigue (not positive on the exact percent, and probably varies by person, for me ~5% is average and when I’ve overshot my RPE’s it’s crept as high as low double digits) it can be a hint that something is off. This could be not taking long enough rest periods, overshooting RPE’s, or just that you need to work more on improving your work capacity. It can also just signal that it was a bad day, so don’t put too much thought into a single acute workout that had higher than desired fatigue. But if you see a trend repeating itself over time then it might signal that there is something going on that is worth exploring.

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