Numbers

by Andrew Gogerty | December 24, 2025

Numbers are strange. We treat them as logical and objective, but most of us have an emotional relationship with them we rarely admit to. We like roundness, symmetry, familiarity. We like 5s and 10s when we count, because they’re easy and rhythmic. Evens feel natural, odds feel messy, though both go up by two.

Walk into any store and you’ll not likely see a $31.00 price tag anywhere. Instead, you’ll find $30.95 or even $30.99. Why? Because at some point in history the strategy of fooling the human brain by a few pennies became part of modern commerce. It works because our brains latch onto tiny differences and react emotionally instead of logically. Something that is $99.95 may seem reasonable, but if it’s $100.00 that could be deemed expensive. And that same mental trickery follows us into the gym – especially if you lose sight of what your program is doing to build strength, even when the practical part of your brain knows better.

The Numbers in the Gym

I didn’t grow up around weights or strength. I was a short, skinny kid who had just enough athletic ability to play four years of high school baseball, but not enough insight to spend time in the weight room. To someone like that, anything in the 100s or 200s was just…heavy. Those were other people’s numbers. Competitive lifter numbers. Fast forward 25-30 years and I decided to start strength training as an adult. The simplicity of Starting Strength – its novice linear progression and predictable increments – made sense to a brain that works in finance and deals with the trends and manipulations of numbers all day.

To be fair, I started light. Too light, probably. My first squat session was 95lb. Then a few weeks later I graduated to a big-boy plate or first "wheel" at 135. By then, if you stay true to the program and faithfully answer the First Three Questions you’re likely off and running. Days were clearly mapped out and predictable. Squat 160 on a Monday, easily survive, no soreness. Then 165 on Wednesday was logical and 100% attainable, and so on. Confidence, built one completed set at a time, creates momentum. But as the weights went up, I noticed something weird: some numbers – totally arbitrary ones – made me react differently when I wrote them down. I would log today’s numbers in my notebook after a workout and then write out my next workout on a small piece of paper for my pocket to take to the gym. But writing down certain numbers for next time sometimes created a “Huh, that’s an interesting number” thought only for a moment. But why only those numbers? Why didn’t 160 and 165 cue the same almost-unconscious thought?

Yard Sales and Landmines

These are only n=1 observations, but I’ve noticed that the quick pauses when working through the weight progressions seem to fall into one of two categories: Plate Math or Round Numbers.

Plate Math is just what it implies. Certain weights allow you to graduate from one combination of plates to a level-up with bigger plates. Think of going from 130 to 135 on the bar. The previous workout is a smattering of plates but today is just one plate. Of course, many novices blow past 135 so quickly in their linear progression they barely think about it. The first real one for the many non-genetically gifted may come, as it did for me, at 225.

I remember the first time I squatted 220x5x3. I had been cruising through my novice linear progression; there was no logical reason for doubt. But when I finished my sets and started stripping the bar it looked…busy. Plates everywhere. It felt like a yard sale on the barbell. And it sort of is – at 220 you’re likely using all the options in a normal commercial gym (45-25-10-5-2.5 on each side). It’s like a mini graduation. More important than going from K to 1st grade, maybe more like high school to college. You’re becoming an adult now, welcome to two plates.

Say goodbye to that 95lb warm-up. You can move to 135 after the empty bar from now on. The funny part is that 220 to 225 is only a 2.3% increase. Five pounds. Five pounds most people wouldn’t even notice if I put it in their hand. Yet that little jump does something to the mind. So, you hit that lift too, put your four plates away, and then, as Jay-Z said, “On to the next.”

The second hurdle, and the one that I have the most vivid memory of, was a Round Number Day. The Round Number days are not set by the combination of standard plates, but rather the familiar numbers I mentioned earlier that the mind treats as milestones: 100, 150, 200, and so on. They’re culturally loaded, emotionally charged…and completely irrational.

A couple of weeks after the 225 squat day, I opened my training notebook at the gym on a random Wednesday and saw the projected work weights of Squat: 300 and Bench: 200. Logically, there was nothing intimidating about this. Two days earlier I had done 295, and five days prior on Friday I had benched 195 without missing a rep. Again, the 5lb increase was tiny: 1.7% for the squat and 2.6% for the bench. No plate change. No huge psychological jump. No reason to worry. Yet I still thought about it for a brief second: 500 pounds. Why? Probably because 300 is a number that means something in the real world. You don’t interact physically with many 300lb objects outside of the gym in daily life. Sure, your car weighs more than that, but you’re not expected to squat it. Meanwhile, although my deadlift was above 300 already, a failed deadlift is easy. If it doesn’t break the floor, just let go. If it gets halfway and you stall out after a genuine grind of the rep, just let it go. A squat…well, a failed squat can be much more dramatic.

Same thing on the bench. I was just going from 195 to 200. But 200 is over your face. Your brain notices that, makes meaning out of it. Even with safeties and a spotter. The weight went up, of course, just like the squat, because the body was easily willing, but the brain still had a brief thought. And it came solely from the number.

500 Is Not What the World Thinks It Is

We’re more of a service economy than ever before. And physically hard things – like a 500lb two-lift total – seem more unusual than they were a generation or two ago. But the longer you train, the more you will realize what a fallacy that is. I’m not a genetic freak, not unusually built for strength, just a short 48yr old going through the NLP. But if I follow the program, recover, show up, and train consistently, every milestone becomes just one small step from the last.

Strength training demands that the body and mind work together, and the mind is usually the weaker of the two. As such, it will remain a novice longer than your physical body. The body adapts to load on a dependable schedule. The mind is influenced by all the nonsense society tells us, and it brings that into training whether it makes sense or not. Don’t let arbitrary numbers erect imaginary walls. They aren’t real. They’re psychological speed bumps that disappear the moment the bar leaves the rack. It’s just weight. It doesn’t know what it says on the plates. And it doesn’t care.