Plate Math

You’ve just finished your 11th set of squats with 535 pounds. You want to drop some weight and go for higher reps to really tone up before you start curling in the squat rack. 530 sounds good right? So you walk over to the side of the bar, remove the clip and stare blankly at the plates on your bar. You have no idea what you are doing. Your brain resembles the matrix right now and you can’t for the life of you figure out what you need to do to remove 5 pounds. Why did your brain just stop? I’ll tell you why! Because all of the available blood in your body is exactly where it should be – in your legs, not in your head. You just did like 700 squats and now your fine motor skills are failing, you can barely form words, and you’re trying to do math?!?! Please.

This is where we come in. Plate Math to the rescue. Try to work up the dexterity to pull out your phone and enter 5-3-0 into the calculator window. Like a team of rocket scientists in the palm of your hand Plate Math magically tells you what plates you need to load up for your 12th set. It’s that easy. This is a no-frills piece of utilitarian software. There’s no fancy loading screens. No animations. No distracting colors or flashing lights. Just math. Cold. Hard. Math.

You like lifting weights. You like lifting weights enough that you are considering downloading an app that calculates how many plates you need to put on the bar to give you a specific weight. You may have a problem. OR YOU MAY BE AWESOME. Picking up heavy objects and putting them back down is your thing. Sounds awesome to me. In order to make this app as functional as possible while wasting as little of your in-between-set time we assume a few things:
1. The bar weighs 45 lbs. There are different weighted bars. But not in this app. The bar weighs 45lbs.
2. The plates you have available are 45lbs, 35lbs, 25lbs, 10lbs 5lbs and 2.5lbs. Some gyms have lighter plates but you shouldn’t be using them anyway. Also if you need a calculator to figure out that 2lbs means 2 1lb weights…just go.
3. You are awesome enough to not try to lift some stupid heavy weight. Sure you can enter 4000lbs in here and see how many plates you need, but trying to lift 4000lbs will surely result in your death. Don’t die.

That’s all there is to it. Download this app and start setting new PR’s now that you won’t be wasting energy on brain power to figure out your plates. Your muscles will thank you.