Which plates to load

What it's for

At the gym you need to load the barbell to a certain weight: this tool tells you exactly which plates to put per side, using standard sizes (25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 2.5, 1.25 kg).

Note

The standard Olympic barbell weighs 20 kg. The shown weight is for EACH side: put the same plates on the right and left.

Why the sum always goes wrong the same way

The weight written on the programme is the total, and half of it goes on each side. The mistake everyone makes at first is loading the full weight per side and ending up with double: that happens less often than you would think, because the bar simply does not move, but the opposite happens constantly, that is forgetting that the bar already weighs something.

A men's Olympic bar weighs twenty kilos, a women's fifteen, a short gym bar as little as ten or twelve. Anyone loading sixty kilos therefore has to put twenty kilos per side, not thirty. That is the sum this page does, and one that is easy to get wrong in a hurry before a heavy set.

The real plate sizes, and the one always missing

Gyms usually have 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 2.5 and 1.25 kilos, but the 1.25 is the one most often missing, and it is precisely the one needed to progress at light loads: without it the minimum jump becomes five kilos total, which on a forty-kilo bench is a twelve per cent increase.

People who train seriously buy fractional plates, of half a kilo or 250 grams, which allow increases of one or two kilos total at a time. It is not an obsessive's detail: on a lift where you are close to your limit, the difference between progressing and stalling lies entirely in the size of the jump available.

How the plates go on

From the heaviest to the lightest, working outwards: that keeps the load closer to the centre, reduces bar whip and makes it obvious at a glance how much is loaded. In competition this is exactly how it is checked, counting the plates from the middle.

The collars are not there to fix the weight but to stop the plates sliding when the bar tilts, which it always does: a plate sliding off one side alone throws you off balance at the worst possible moment. And they belong on even with light loads, because it is with few plates that they rattle most.

When a round weight is impossible

With the available sizes some numbers cannot be made: 63 kilos with a 20-kilo bar would need 21.5 per side, and without fractional plates there is no way. In that case the right choice is rounding down and doing one more repetition, not rounding up and losing technique.

The same goes for weight-stack machines, where the jumps are fixed and often enormous: there the small add-on plates for the stack exist precisely for this. And it goes for dumbbells, where the commercial jump is two and a half kilos per dumbbell, that is five kilos total, which on a shoulder exercise is a great deal.

Nearby tools

For your maximum there is One-rep max calculator, for set timing Interval timer and for consumption Calories burned. On the body side Body fat calculator and Macronutrient calculator.