Choosing
attempts

You get three attempts at each lift. Your total is your best successful squat, plus your best successful bench, plus your best successful deadlift. Nothing else counts. A missed lift is worth exactly zero, and three misses on one lift means you have no total at all, which is what bombing out means and why it stings for months.

Read that back and the strategy falls out of it on its own. The job on the day is not to lift the most you possibly can. It is to end the day with the biggest number that you actually made. Those two things sound identical and they produce completely different attempt selections.

What each attempt is for

The three attempts do three different jobs, and almost every attempt selection disaster comes from asking one of them to do another's.

The opener, which is the most important lift of the day

An opener is not a warm-up and it is not a statement. It is a weight you could hit for a comfortable triple on your worst day. Not your best day. The day you slept badly, weighed in early, have been sat in a warm hall for two hours and are more nervous than you expected.

As a percentage of a genuine recent single, openers land in this sort of range. These are the same figures the attempt calculator uses:

If it is your first meet, take the conservative column and do not argue with it. If you are chasing a qualifying total and know exactly what you need, the aggressive column exists, and it costs you the safety margin you are about to read about.

Choose them weeks out, not on the day

The single most common mistake I see is an athlete choosing attempts in the warm-up room based on how the warm-ups felt. Warm-ups lie in both directions. Adrenaline makes 80% feel like nothing, and being cold and nervous makes it feel like a grind, and neither tells you much about a single at 95%.

All nine attempts should be written down before you leave the house, off numbers you actually hit in training, and the opener should be a weight you have taken for a comfortable double or triple in the last block. Then the only decision left on the day is whether to move the third, which is the one decision worth making with fresh information.

The deadlift is not like the other two

By the time you get to it you have been in the venue for hours, you have already taken six maximal attempts, and your total is mostly already banked. Three things follow.

• Be more conservative than the maths says. A deadlift opener that would be right when fresh is often one you would rather not meet at four in the afternoon.
• The third is arithmetic, not ambition. You know your total going into it. If a qualifying total or a placing is on the line, the right third is the smallest one that gets you there, not the biggest one you might make.
• Grinding a deadlift is slow. A squat you nearly miss takes a second. A deadlift you nearly miss can take eight, and there is nowhere to hide from it.

Jumps, and rounding

The gap between attempts should shrink as the weight goes up. A big jump from the opener to the second is normal because the opener was deliberately light. A big jump from the second to the third is usually somebody hoping.

Attempts go up in whole increments the loaders can actually make, and in most federations the minimum increase is 2.5kg. When your calculated number falls between plates, round down. Rounding up on an opener is the wrong error to make, and the two and a half kilos you saved have never once been the reason someone missed a total.

If a specific total is the point

Qualifying is a different problem from personal bests. If you need a number to enter something, work backwards: take the total you need, subtract the squat and bench you are confident of, and the remainder is the deadlift third you have to make. Then check whether that is a weight you have any business attempting, and if it is not, the honest answer is that this is not the meet you qualify at.

The qualifying total calculator will tell you what the number actually is for your class and age category, and the weightlifting one does the same job for snatch and clean and jerk.

When you miss

• Missed the opener? Take it again. Almost always. You need a lift on the board far more than you need the two and a half kilos.
• Missed the second? Repeat it, unless it was clearly a technical error you understand and can fix, in which case repeating it is still usually right.
• Missed the third? Nothing to do. That is what a third is for, and a meet where you make all nine often means you left something on the platform.
• Red lights on a lift that felt fine? Ask what the call was, and fix that rather than the weight. Your first meet covers the handful of things that turn a good lift down.

The short version

Open with something boring. Build with something you have done. Save the ambition for the third, where missing it costs you nothing. Write all nine down before the day, in the gym, when you are calm and not in a singlet.

The lifters who total the most are almost never the ones who took the biggest attempts. They are the ones who made the ones they took.