In practice this is the ramp to your working weight, and the main way to get it wrong is to let it become the workout.
A pyramid steps the load up while the reps come down. Empty bar for ten, forty percent for eight, sixty percent for five, seventy-five percent for three, then your working sets. Some versions come back down the other side, which is where the name comes from, though the ascending half is what does the work.
The word gets used for two different things and it's worth separating them. There's the pyramid as a training method, where the whole session is the ramp up and back down. And there's the pyramid as a warm-up ramp, three or four sets bridging an empty bar to your first working set. In our library it's almost entirely the second, and every seeded pyramid we carry is a warm-up.
The ramp exists to do two things at once: prepare the movement pattern and reach your working weight without arriving flat. Those goals conflict. More ramping means a better-grooved pattern and more accumulated fatigue, so the whole craft is in doing the least you can get away with.
Three to four steps is the standard, and our seeded ramps stick to it. A barbell squat ramp runs empty bar for ten, forty percent for eight, sixty percent for five, seventy-five percent for three. A horizontal pull needs less, so the row ramp uses three: forty percent for ten, sixty percent for six, seventy-five percent for four. A deadlift ramp goes higher on the last step, because the hardest part of a heavy pull is finding the position rather than moving the weight, and a heavy single before your working set does that better than another set of five.
Reps fall as load rises for a straightforward reason: once the weight approaches something meaningful, more reps buys you fatigue rather than preparation. Nobody needs eight reps at seventy-five percent to be ready for a set at a hundred. Three is enough, and three is what's cheap.
The failure mode is one everyone recognises. The ramp creeps from four steps to six, the last step creeps from seventy-five to ninety percent, and now your first working set is your fourth-heaviest set of the day. Our own ramp notes say it plainly: grease the groove, don't fatigue, and never take a warm-up ramp near failure.
Our barbell squat ramp is four steps: empty bar for ten, forty percent for eight, sixty percent for five, seventy-five percent for three, with sixty seconds between them, running about eight minutes. For a hundred and forty kilo working weight that's twenty kilos for ten, fifty-six for eight, eighty-four for five and a hundred and five for three. Twenty-six reps of preparation. Add the volume-load and it comes to roughly 1,380 kilos, against 700 kilos for one working set of a hundred and forty for five. So a well-behaved warm-up ramp already carries about twice the volume-load of your first working set, which is exactly why it can't grow. Add two more steps and take the last one to ninety percent, and the ramp is now doing more total work than three working sets. The seed note is one line and it's the right line: grease the groove, don't fatigue. If the last ramp step feels like it needed a mental preparation, the ramp has become part of the workout.
4 ramping sets: empty bar ×10 → 40% ×8 → 60% ×5 → 75% ×3
Pyramid steps are labelled sets rather than rounds, which is the correct word for what they are and reflects that this structure lives with strength work rather than conditioning. Each step carries its own load guidance, so the player shows you forty percent of working weight on step two and seventy-five percent on step four rather than repeating one prescription four times.
The work's paced by you and the rest between steps counts itself down, typically sixty seconds on a press or squat ramp and ninety on a deadlift ramp where the recovery genuinely matters. Nothing about the ramp gets logged as working volume.
One classification detail worth knowing if you write your own prescriptions. The parser recognises a pyramid from the literal word, and it checks the ladder pattern first, so a scheme written as five, eight, ten, eight without the word pyramid attached is read as a ladder. Both run the same way in the player, but the label on your history is the one you wrote. Include the word and you'll get the label you meant.
A sequence where the load climbs while the reps fall, usually three or four steps from an empty bar to just below your working weight. Some versions descend the other side afterwards, which is where the name comes from. In practice, and throughout our own library, a pyramid is the warm-up ramp that gets you to your first working set.
Three or four for most barbell lifts. A squat or bench ramp typically runs empty bar, 40 percent, 60 percent and 75 percent. A horizontal pull needs less and three is enough. A deadlift ramp benefits from a heavier final step, because finding the position matters more than moving the weight. More than four steps usually means you are training rather than warming up.
No. Warm-up sets are preparation and should not go into your weekly set count for a muscle group. Counting them is a common way to under-train while believing you did enough. The volume-load is not trivial, though, which is the reason to keep the ramp short rather than to count it.
No. In a pyramid the load moves and the reps fall with it. In a ladder the load stays fixed and only the reps step. That difference decides what each one is for: a pyramid prepares you for heavy work, and a ladder is a way to accumulate volume on a single movement at a single load.
Build a plan and Fire Your Coach will schedule it, hold the prescription on the screen while you work, and record what actually happened, so next time the numbers start from what you really did.