Give it the bench set you actually pressed: the weight, the reps, how many you had left, and how you pressed them.
Estimates are for general guidance only and are not medical advice. For a personalised plan, book a free guided tour at RPM Gym.
The headline carries the standard you selected — estimated paused bench press 1RM, or touch-and-go, or competition. That label is doing real work. Touch-and-go and paused are not two versions of one lift, they are two lifts, and the number from one does not describe the other.
Reps left in reserve are folded in before anything else. Three reps with a fourth still there is treated as a set of four, because the equations describe a set that ended when the bar stopped moving. Under-report the reserve and the estimate comes back low.
The working weight for your chosen rep target is the number most people actually came for. Nobody opens a bench calculator to admire a single. They open it because there are five sets to load on Monday and they want to know what goes on the bar.
Below that sit the standard three: roughly 90%, 80% and 70% of the estimate, at 3, 8 and 12 reps. What to do with percentages is the hub calculator's subject. What to press them on is this one's.
Effective reps = reps entered + reps left in reserve. Epley: 1RM = weight × (1 + effective reps ÷ 30). Brzycki: 1RM = weight × 36 ÷ (37 − effective reps). The estimate is the mean of the two. Working weight for N reps = mean of (estimate ÷ (1 + N ÷ 30)) and (estimate × (37 − N) ÷ 36) — the same average, inverted, so the working weight and the estimate cannot disagree.
A paused set on the bench: 90 kg for 3, with an honest admission that a fourth rep was there.
About 100.1 kg paused. Enter the identical set as a flat 3 with nothing in reserve and the tool returns 97.1 kg instead — three kilos of estimate resting on one honest answer, and it is the lower figure most lifters end up programming from.
Enter what you actually did — the tool labels the result either way. If you have a choice about which set to test with, make it paused. It removes the variable that changes most between good days and bad ones, and it is the number a programme and a platform both understand.
Lower, and nobody can give you a percentage. The gap depends on your arch, your chest, how hard you bounce and how long the pause is, and no published figure covers that spread. Press a heavy single each way a few weeks apart and you will have your own answer, which is the only one worth having.
Because reps at a given percentage genuinely do vary between exercises — Nuzzo's meta-regression published separate bench and leg-press tables for that reason — but Shimano's group found those differences were much less pronounced around 80 to 90% of max, which is exactly where a 1RM estimate is taken. Inventing a bench equation would be fake precision. What really differs on the bench is what counts as a rep, so that is what this page asks about.
It lengthens the set before the maths runs. Entering 3 reps with 1 in reserve estimates from a set of 4, which at 90 kg is the difference between 97.1 kg and 100.1 kg. The longer the set and the further from failure it was, the bigger that correction gets.
No, and the reserve field exists so that you do not have to. Failure on the bench means a loaded bar stopping on your chest, which needs pins or a spotter to be a routine event rather than an emergency. Leave a rep, report it honestly, and the arithmetic handles the rest.
Both, of different lifts. A competition press is paused motionless on the chest and started on a referee's command, so it is always the smaller of the two and always the one that counts on a platform. Keep both if you like — just never programme from one and claim the other.
Bring the standard with you: the coaching team in Al Manhal will watch a set, call the pause and tell you which of your two bench numbers is worth programming from. Book a free guided tour.