What do you guys think about this concept they have called “appropriating weight”, where you factor in a percentage of your body weight into your numbers for various lifts?
Here’s what Kelly Baggett has to say on the matter:
"Appropriating weight- Another important thing to note is that when figuring load you need to factor your bodyweight into the load. For example, you’re doing bench presses and they call for you to use 50% of your 1rm. Say your 1rm is 100lbs and you weigh 100lbs. First you need to determine how much of your bodyweight is involved in the movement. Here is a chart that will help
So in this case you would add 15% of your bodyweight into the bench press total giving you 115lbs. You would then take 50% of this, or 57.5lbs and then subtract out your bodyweight factor, giving you a total of 42.5 for 50%."
Wow where did you find this? I’ve never heard of it. you got a link? and why a whole fifteen percent for bench press? Isn’t it just your arms you should factor in?
here’s the link-- the Inno-Sport system is fairly complex in terms of terminology and calculation, and Kelley Baggett wrote a nice article simplifying a lot of it…this was in the article at the following link: http://inno-sport.net/Training%20Basics.htm
I don’t know why it’s a 15% BW adjustment for the bench press, but I’m sort of curious if anyone else uses an adjustment for body weight…
[quote]Pbjoe wrote:
Wow where did you find this? I’ve never heard of it. you got a link? and why a whole fifteen percent for bench press? Isn’t it just your arms you should factor in?[/quote]
Huh?
Dude… your whole chest gets pounded when you bench.
[quote]Fuzzy-47 wrote:
Pbjoe wrote:
Wow where did you find this? I’ve never heard of it. you got a link? and why a whole fifteen percent for bench press? Isn’t it just your arms you should factor in?
Huh?
Dude… your whole chest gets pounded when you bench.
[/quote]
I mean bodyweight. Your body is lying flat on a bench, you aren’t lifting it, why such a large percentage of bodyweight dude. because apparently your calculating in what percentage of bodyweight your lifting as well as the bar and weights. the arms are the only thing rising of the chest i guess. whatever.
It’s a good jumping off point, at least in factoring in a greater bodyweight for the lower body movements as opposed to upper, but I think finding the proper percentages requires some trial and error. For instance a 50% AW squat doesn’t feel the same as a 50% AW bench to me.
in my opinion, appropriated weight only overcomplicates things… especially when trying to use it in conjunction with other inno-sport methods like calculating % drop-off. baggett also writes on his site a great article called “this ain’t rocket science” addressing sort of the old KISS (keep it simple, stupid) concept with training. when i was training inno-sport style, i threw AW out. i didn’t really want to sit down in the gym with a calculator between sets.
[quote]tpa wrote:
Sounds like minutia to me. What’s the point of factoring your body weight in? Is it to make people feel better about lifting shitty weight?
The only time I can see this as relevant is during true bodyweight exercises like pull up variations.[/quote]
Whether the weight is a part of you or stacked on your back, it doesn’t really matter, it’s all still a portion of the total weight lifted, right? Counting only bar weight is just as stupid a mistake as counting only the proportion of body weight lifted for a given movment and assuming any degree of additional bar weight to be a non-factor.
What is next? Should we factor in the length or the limbs and calculate how far the weight had to travel in order to determine how much work was done? Things like that usually stay constant and should cancel out. It seems a bit anal to add that in.
Bodyweight should only be considered in realtion to the lift (ex. 2x bodyweight bench) as a way to help compare numbers against a wide variety of different sized lifters.
I think there are obviously times (dips/chins/pull-ups etc.) where your bodyweight is going to affect the lift ALOT and so you’ld be stupid not to factor it in. In other cases, like the squat, I’d never really thought about it but I suppose it would make a little difference.
I think your bodyweight would have to change fairly dramatically for it to make much of a difference worth bothering with for most exercises, except in the ones I listed above. I.e. If you put on 5lbs in BW in 3 months, 15% of that is 0.75 of a pound. If your bench has gone up so little that you need that 0.75lb to claim lifting progress then you’re in trouble!
I believe that in the InnoSport system, the point in using appropriating weight isn’t to compare yourself with other lifters.
You do max sets until you reach a 6% drop off in performance, then you stop. In order to calculate the appropriate 6%, you need to factor in bodyweight contribution.
Using the 85% squat, if you weigh 180, 85% of your bodyweight would be 153. You add this to the weight you are squatting, let’s say 315: 153+315=468. Then you take 6% of 468, which equals 28.08, about 28. So you would stop the max sets when you could only lift 287 (315-28=287).
If you used 6% of 315 (not taking bodyweight into account), then you would stop doing sets when you could only lift 296 in your max sets (315-18.9=296.1). So you wouldn’t be getting enough work in.
The 10 pound difference does not sound like much, but it is when working with max weights.
It’s really not very complicated and I can pretty much do it in my head and don’t really think about it any more because I know generally what a drop-off would be for me on a given exercise.
If you think about it, it’s just logical. If you’re doing weighted pull-ups with #50 attached, and you take 10 pounds off, you aren’t doing 80% of the weight now… because your bodyweight is a big factor.
It also aligns intuitively with what many already know. I think most people would feel that a squat at 95% of their 1RM is more difficult than a 95% bench, because more bodyweight is lifted in the squat, so a 95% 1RM squat is more like 97% AW.
Honestly though, it’s not something that you need to be worrying about being super-accurate with, since fatigue calculations are not always all that accurate anyway.
[quote]smallmike wrote:
The 10 pound difference does not sound like much, but it is when working with max weights.[/quote]
Thanks for this reply-- articulated things better than I did.
To the poster who thought you used your bodyweight increase to claim progress, it’s not that at all. The point of appropriating is to manage your workload well so that you get the proper response while still recovering quickly.
[quote]InCorporeSano wrote:
To the poster who thought you used your bodyweight increase to claim progress, it’s not that at all. The point of appropriating is to manage your workload well so that you get the proper response while still recovering quickly. [/quote]OK cool, yeah it makes sense anyway if you’re controlling everything that precisely.