One poor assumption I have made with regards to lecturing on the Max Effort Black box deals with the athlete’s experience with finding the daily max effort. I’m up there babbling about finding that best effort for 5, 3 or 1 on a particular move and then suddenly it hits me—The majority of my audience is lost. I often times get the same tilted head, glazed over look my Airedales give me when I’m talking to them. It’s bad coaching on my part and I regret that. Failure breeds innovation. So now we have another way.

After a month on the road, in front of friends, coaches, and athletes I returned to base to tweak out a thing or two. I broke out some training logs, a calculator and excel spreadsheet and found an alternative route to working through the three weeks rep rotation. This is nothing new to those who follow, practice and study the world of strength and conditioning. It’s just a method that I have avoided to keep things a bit less cumbersome and a bit more intuitive.

As a refresher, a particular movement is selected from an inventory of total lower and upper body movements. The first week is an introductory week of 5s, followed by a week of 5 x 3 and finally a week of 5 x 1. The objective each time is to reach a best effort work set on the final set of the day. It’s at this point where difficulty arises in determining how to progress and arrive at that final work set. Percentage based MEBB to the rescue. Now Fans and coaches can plug their athletes into a max and have all their Sets calculated out for the three weeks.

You will need one or all of the following. A chart, a calculator or an excel spreadsheet to do the work. I would suggest finding any one of 1000 max charts or formulas available on the Internet.

If you don’t have a max for an athlete then just do some conservative projections and have them start. Here you go.

MEBB PERCENTAGE BASED PROGRAMMING

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3
5@55%	3@63%	1@70%
5@63%	3@70%	1@77%
5@70%	3@77%	1@85%
5@77%	3@85%	1@93%
5@85%	3@93%	1@100-101%

I can already anticipate the outcry at the oddball percentages. Yes, you can round up to 65,80,and 95 percentages to make your chart neat and tidy.

You can also make your own chart with MS Excel. Find a business/accounting or math friend to help if you are like me.

1RM	101%	93%	85%	77%	70%	63%	55%	50%
50	51	47	43	39	35	32	28	25

Total body moves for the week of 5s and 3s May require a reset after each set for many. No big deal. Dump it safely and go again.

I hope that this helps with the difficulty on finding a best effort and keeps you on track.