Welcome back to the Data Tracking For Weightlifting Series, if you’ve just found this article, I’d recommend starting on the first article in the series to better understand why we track data and what metrics we track. In this article we’ll be talking about tracking reps, why its important, and how it relates to other metrics we will cover later on.

First of all, tracking reps is the easiest metric to track, making it low hanging fruit to begin tracking, and if you wanted to, you can go back and track data from all of your programs without any real work. I recommend tracking reps of:

• Snatches

• Cleans

• Jerks

• Presses

• Pulls

• Squats

First of all, this will allow you to see your own biases in your programs. It will also allow to you go back and analyze what worked really well for your lifter, and what didn’t. You may find that a certain lifter responds really well to high reps of squatting, regardless of the weight, and some respond very poorly to high reps of squats. A more common problem, but less often realized problem is that your lifter may only respond well to a certain number of jerks, and any more than that will start to cause issues in the shoulders. You may also find that a lifter responds favorably to a certain ratio of snatches to cleans, while their jerks may need to be less frequent than their cleans, which will help you outline your programming schedule better.

Tracking reps is the first step to tracking other more complicated metrics that we will discuss in future articles such as Tonnage and Average Intensity, so when beginning to track programming metrics, start here!

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