Effective Rep Schemes for Strength Training: An Ode to Jerry Martin and the Psychology of the Weight Room

There is no shortage of methodologies for prescribing rep schemes in the modern weight room, including Velocity-Based Training, Rate of Perceived Exertion, and Reps in Reserve. Coaches today have an alphabet soup of tools at their disposal. Yet for all the sophistication of modern programming, a fundamental question often goes unanswered: does the athlete actually know what they are doing, and do they know why?

Jerry Martin did. Over more than two decades at the University of Connecticut, he filled his coaching toolbox with methods for rep scheme design that quietly solved one of the most persistent problems in strength training: the mismatch between what a coach prescribes and what an athlete is psychologically prepared to execute. Two of those tools in particular deserve a closer look. Call this an ode to Jerry.

Who Was Jerry Martin?

Gerald "Jerry" Martin served as the Strength and Conditioning Coordinator at the University of Connecticut from 1990 until his passing in 2015, a tenure of 25 years that touched virtually every athlete across UConn's 24-sport athletic program. He was a two-time finalist for the National Strength and Conditioning Association's College Strength and Conditioning Professional of the Year Award, an adjunct professor in the Department of Kinesiology, a co-author of multiple peer-reviewed publications, and the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the USA Women's Field Hockey National and Olympic teams.

His influence was felt not just in records and championships, but in something harder to quantify: the psychological readiness of the athletes he developed. His weight room produced results that defied recruiting rankings. UConn football teams competed physically against programs with far greater resources, and his basketball players were among the best-conditioned athletes in the country. Those who worked alongside him will tell you the reason was not the programming alone. It was the mindset he cultivated in every athlete who walked through that door.

Two Tools Worth Rescuing From the Toolbox

Jerry's program was never built on a single method. He had a deep toolbox, and he reached for different instruments depending on the athlete, the sport, and the moment. But two of those tools deserve special attention, because they are precisely the kind of thing coaches tend to overlook in the chase for whatever is new and flashy. The slides and the open set are not relics. They work, they are grounded in science, and many coaches get this whole area wrong by skipping past it on the way to the next piece of technology.

The First Tool: The Slides

The slides were elegantly simple. An athlete was given a fixed set and rep structure with a built-in progression at the end. Say the prescription was five sets of five. An athlete might do 30 pounds for a set of five, 30 for five, 30 for five, and then on the final set "slide" up to the next available weight, 35 pounds, for the last five reps. The reps were pre-set. The weight climbed linearly, at the athlete's own speed.

What made the slide work was that final bump. Once an athlete could complete all five reps at the top of the slide, that weight became the new working load the following session. The next time out, they might run 35 for five, then slide to 40, and so on. The first attempt at a new top weight often came up short. An athlete might hit 55 pounds for only three reps because that slide sat just slightly outside their current reach. That was expected. The next time they saw that same slide, they might get four reps. Eventually, they would get all five, and only then would 55 pounds become the new working load.The athlete kept pushing, and the load progressed honestly because the body, not a spreadsheet, set the pace. You earned the next weight by demonstrating you could handle the current one. There was no guessing, no inflated percentages, just steady, self-paced advancement with a clear rule for when to climb.

The Second Tool: The Open Set

The second tool is where things become genuinely novel. Here Jerry moved from prescribing reps to prescribing only the weight and a target. In the open set format, the rep scheme was no longer given. Instead, the athlete received a weight, typically predicted at 80 or 85 percent of their maximum, and a target number of total reps. How they navigated their way to that total was entirely up to them. Fifteen reps at the prescribed load might become fifteen singles, three sets of five, five sets of three, or any combination the athlete chose to manage fatigue in the moment.

This is the critical distinction between the two tools. The slides fixed the reps and progressed the weight. The open set fixed the weight and total volume and handed the athlete the rep scheme as a problem to solve. That shift, from prescribed structure to athlete-navigated structure, is what separates this from conventional programming. It is not laziness in design. It is a diagnostic instrument of the highest order, because how an athlete chooses to attack a target reveals their psychology as clearly as their physiology.

Why Open Sets Matter: The Shimano Problem

The open set format solved a real and underappreciated problem in load prescription, one captured well in the research. In a foundational 2006 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Shimano and colleagues examined how many repetitions trained and untrained men could actually perform at fixed percentages of their one-rep maximum across different free-weight exercises. The finding was striking: the number of reps achievable at a given percentage like 80 percent varies substantially between exercises and between individuals.

This matters for anyone prescribing rep ranges off a percentage chart. A fixed prescription assumes everyone responds to 80 percent the same way. They do not. Move beyond the main compound lifts into complex movements like lunges and step-ups, and structural or stability-limiting factors can prevent an athlete from ever reaching the rep range the chart predicts. Individual anthropometry compounds the issue. A shorter athlete with shorter lever arms may find their effective 80 percent behaves differently than a taller training partner's at the identical relative load.

The open set sidesteps all of this. By fixing the weight and the total target while freeing the rep scheme, Martin let each athlete self-organize around their own structural reality. The athlete who needed smaller clusters did so; the athlete who could string longer sets together did that. Both hit the same productive dose. The prescription bent to the individual rather than forcing the individual to bend to the prescription. The Shimano study is referenced in the NSCA's literature on intensity and resistance.

The Psychology Behind the Choice

The first time an athlete is handed an open set, their immediate instinct is to ask what they should do. That reaction alone tells a coach everything. Some athletes push beyond what a coach might have prescribed; others retreat to safety. Both responses are data, and both are opportunities for coaching.

What Martin was doing was widening the aperture, expanding an athlete's self-awareness before narrowing it into precision. By letting athletes experience what different rep schemes felt like at the same load, he built what might be called intercept perspective: a felt understanding of effort, fatigue, and capacity that no external number can fully convey. So much of modern programming lives in an artificial land of percentages that don't reflect actual capacity, RPE scores that are educated guesses, and RIR estimates that vary wildly between athletes and sessions. Martin's approach grounded everything in the athlete's demonstrated reality. For freshmen, this is invaluable. For veterans, it offers recalibration, because what a seasoned athlete thought was hard may not have been, and an honest target reveals that.

The Role of INOL: Science in the Background

Running quietly beneath all of this was a tool Martin and his staff used to track and interpret what they were seeing: the Intensity Number of Lifts, or INOL. Developed by strength coach Hristo Hristov and built upon the foundational work of Soviet sports scientist A.S. Prilepin, INOL converts training stress into a single number accounting for both the reps performed and the intensity at which they were performed.

INOL = Reps ÷ (100 − Intensity%)

A session INOL below 0.4 for a given lift represents low-demand work. Between 0.4 and 1.0 is the productive working zone for most athletes. Values approaching 2.0 represent a much higher fatigue cost, driven by more work performed closer to the athlete’s limit. What made Martin's use distinctive was keeping it behind the scenes entirely. As athletes navigated their own open sets over time, their INOL scores became a window into their psychological state as much as their physical one. An athlete consistently migrating toward lower-effort schemes was a coaching conversation. An athlete hitting the top end of their range with the INOL climbing steadily was a green light to add load. The math did not replace coaching judgment. It sharpened it.

Henneman's Size Principle: The Neuroscience Underneath

There is a reason this approach works at a physiological level, and it connects directly to Henneman's Size Principle. First described by Harvard physiologist Elwood Henneman and colleagues in 1965, the principle establishes that motor units are recruited in an orderly, size-dependent fashion, with smaller, fatigue-resistant units firing first and larger, more forceful units recruited progressively as force demands increase.

High-rep volume at lower intensities can exhaust the system through localized fatigue before an athlete reaches the zones where meaningful strength adaptation occurs. Martin's emphasis on doing as few reps as necessary at the right intensity, with full intent, respected this hierarchy. Whether working in the 3-to-5 rep range or the 8-to-10, knowing which motor unit populations are being targeted is the difference between training that builds and training that simply fatigues.

Addressing the Critics

No methodology worth its salt goes unchallenged. The most common objection is that giving athletes choice is simply guessing with no real calibration. This collapses the moment you examine the structure. Athlete choice is never unconstrained. Setting a target at 80 to 85 percent of a one-rep maximum places the athlete inside the 5RM-to-10RM zone, a well-defined corridor of intensity stress with known demands. The total volume guarantees the dose regardless of how the athlete gets there, and the progression is self-correcting: hit the top of the range, add weight; need more time at a load, the system accommodates it. No one coasts without the math revealing it.

Some argue that INOL, derived from research on Soviet Olympic weightlifters, has no business in a college team sport weight room. This mistakes the origin of a tool for the limit of its application. The relationship between load intensity and total volume is not sport-specific. It is human physiology. And Martin never applied INOL prescriptively; he used it diagnostically on the backend to interpret what athletes demonstrated through their own choices, which sidesteps the population concern entirely.

The technology objection deserves equal scrutiny. Velocity-based transducers measure how fast the bar moves, not whether the athlete is actually trying to move it as fast as possible. At heavier intensities in the 0.6 to 0.8 meters-per-second range, where contractile tissue does the work rather than elastic rebound, the difference between genuine maximal intent and a half-effort lift is invisible to a sensor. A transducer is only as honest as the athlete holding the bar. Technology tells you what happened; the Martin approach develops why it happens, and that layer is something no sensor is designed to address.

What Confidence Actually Looks Like

Confidence in the Martin framework has a specific, observable signature: an athlete consistently choosing the top end of their target, demonstrating progressively higher INOL values by their own initiative, and knowing when to back off. The same self-awareness that enables pushing enables restraint. This is intra-set auto-regulation grounded in psychology, the athlete's own accumulated experience telling them what is true rather than an app reporting a readiness score.

That culture, a weight room unafraid of failure and eager to push because it had seen what pushing produced, is what Jerry built across every UConn program he touched. There is no reason on paper that UConn football should have competed physically with the programs it faced at its peak. But it did. UConn beat No. 11 South Florida in 2007, walked into Notre Dame and won in double overtime in 2009, and fought through West Virginia and Pittsburgh in 2010 on the way to a Big East title and Fiesta Bowl appearance. That was not an accident of recruiting. It was the product of athletes who knew exactly what they were doing and why.

Reading the Program at Every Level

Take these tools at the surface level and they already pay for themselves. Run the slides and open sets safely and athletes get stronger, which is a win in and of itself. But for the coach who wants to push further and be more tailored in their approach, the same choices that reveal an individual athlete's psychology can be read at every level of a program.

At the individual level, you learn what each athlete knows about themselves and how hard they are willing to work. Zoom out and you can read a position group, an offense, or a defense as a unit. Zoom out further and you can compare entire programs. What is the volleyball team doing relative to softball, relative to baseball, in terms of genuine effort under load? As athletes get into the tougher lifts and push the higher-end weight training numbers, those patterns become culturally revealing. They tell you where a group actually is, where it is capable of going, and what is appropriate to ask of it next. Few programming systems give you that kind of read across the individual, the unit, and the whole department at once.

A Note for Coaches Ready to Apply It

For coaches looking to adopt these tools, the order Jerry's athletes followed is a sound one. Begin with the slides, building the habit of earning weight through demonstrated performance, with the bump-up set teaching athletes what the edge of their capacity feels like. Then layer in open sets, handing athletes the rep scheme as a problem to solve at a fixed, honestly predicted percentage. The single most important instruction is to take your time. Track INOL on the backend and let the data inform coaching conversations rather than public programming decisions. Out of any group of ten athletes, some will push immediately and others will be risk-averse. Both are valid starting points, and the hesitant athlete is not a problem but an opportunity. Each load they choose and execute, each progression earned by hitting the upper range of their target, is confidence being built from the inside out, which is the only kind that lasts.

Anecdotally, having watched this work thousands of times over, what Jerry figured out and how he applied it was genuinely unique, and the success speaks for itself. Beyond the simple fact that people get very, very strong using these mathematically proven, physics-driven approaches, the athletes tend to like it. They get to go at their own pace. Work hard and you get great results; have an off day and that is okay too. For the coach looking to give their program a real edge, that combination is hard to beat. We pay homage to Jerry in this ode, but the larger point is not to forget the tools that are incredibly effective, grounded in science, and capable of making a real difference at both the individual and the team level, simply because they are not the newest thing on the market.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are effective rep schemes for strength training? Effective rep schemes match total volume and intensity to the athlete's real, demonstrated capacity rather than a generic chart. Two of the most effective and most overlooked are the slide, which fixes reps and progresses weight linearly, and the open set, which fixes the weight and total rep target while letting the athlete choose how to cluster the reps. Both keep the athlete working at the productive edge of their ability.

Q: What is the difference between a slide and an open set? A slide prescribes a fixed set-and-rep structure, such as five sets of five, with a built-in jump to the next weight on the final set. An open set prescribes only the weight, typically 80 to 85 percent of max, and a total rep target, leaving the athlete to navigate the rep scheme on their own. Both are tools in the larger toolbox. The slide is the more straightforward of the two and a natural starting point; the open set is the more advanced, psychology-driven option.

Q: Who was Jerry Martin? Gerald "Jerry" Martin served as UConn's Strength and Conditioning Coordinator from 1990 to 2014, overseeing athlete development across all 24 of the university's intercollegiate programs. He was a two-time NSCA College Professional of the Year finalist, an adjunct Kinesiology professor, and the Head Strength Coach for the USA Women's Field Hockey Olympic team. Read more about his career here.

Q: What is INOL and why does it matter? INOL, or Intensity Number of Lifts, is a training load metric derived from Prilepin's research and developed by Hristo Hristov. It converts rep volume and intensity percentage into a single stress score, allowing coaches to assess whether a session falls within productive, manageable, or excessive loading ranges. Learn more at Lift Vault's INOL resource.

Q: Why not just use a percentage chart to set reps? Because, as the 2006 Shimano study showed, the number of reps achievable at a given percentage varies by exercise and by individual. Lever-arm length, exercise complexity, and stability demands all shift how a given percentage actually behaves. Open sets let each athlete self-organize around their own structure while still hitting the prescribed dose. See the NSCA discussion of intensity and resistance.

Q: Is this approach only for experienced athletes? No. The slides in particular are ideal for athletes new to the weight room, building genuine body awareness before complex programming is introduced. Open sets are the natural next layer, and they are equally effective as a recalibration tool for veterans whose self-perception has drifted from their actual capacity.

Q: Does the athlete need to understand INOL for this to work? Not initially. INOL is a coaching staff tool in this framework. As athletes develop, introducing the conceptual layer can be empowering, but the experience must come first. Understanding follows the doing, not the other way around.

About the Author

Thomas Newman is the Founder and Chief Performance Officer of Newman Performance Systems (Newman HP), a concierge high-performance organization serving professional athletes across MLB and the NFL, collegiate programs, and high-performing executives. He spent five years at Yale University as Director of Student Performance and Innovation, overseeing 800+ student-athletes across 29 varsity teams and contributing to a National Championship in Men's Lacrosse and back-to-back Ivy League titles in football. He previously served as Chief Innovation Officer at Hawkin Dynamics and as a Lead Performance Specialist at Mass General Brigham's Center for Sports Performance and Research.

Thomas is a co-author of the Human Kinetics textbook Developing The Athlete : An Applied Sport Science Roadmap for Optimizing Performance Success(Kraemer, Ratamess, Newman, 2024), a peer-reviewed researcher, and a NSCA-Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist since 2007. His work currently protects more than $151 million in active client career earnings. During his tenure at Yale, Thomas had the opportunity to study Jerry Martin's original programs through shared files and direct conversations with coaches who worked under Martin at UConn. He has applied those methods with his athletes ever since, from Yale varsity programs through to the professional athletes he works with today at Newman HP.

To learn more about Newman HP or explore the free Coach's Toolbox, visit newmanhp.com. For inquiries about working with Thomas directly, reach him at contactus@newmanhp.com.

Newman HP is committed to bringing evidence-based, practitioner-informed content to coaches, athletes, and performance professionals. The concepts in this article are drawn from primary sources created during Jerry Martin's tenure as the director of strength and conditioning at UConn.