Please tell me how many athletes you have ever seen who were capable of doing 6 reps @ 90% of their real 1RM. They never tested 1RM and he said he wasn’t sure what the percentage would be and you simply asked if he thought it could be 90%–either way, he didn’t know and he said they never went over the 6RM It’s pretty simple.
It is pretty simple if you have an appreciation for statistics, and at least a little respect for Charlie’s knowledge. The RM charts are computed statistically from actual observations, so for the chart that I, and I think most others, use, the chart indicates that the average participant could perform 6 reps at 85%. A smaller percentage might have only perform 6 reps at 82.5% and 87.5%, and a smaller percentage still would get 6 at 80% and 90%; the makings of the proverbial bell curve. There are tails in both directions, and it would not surprise me at all if the 98th percentile of athletes can do 6 reps at 90%, just as it would not surprise me that the 5th percentile might only manage 6 reps at around 80% or even less. Remember, that’s 2 out of one hundred. So not many, but if anyone could, you would expect it to be an elite athlete with exceptional strength endurance.
As per Ben, I would assume he would be in the top one or two percentile in terms of strength endurance, so it does not suprise me that he might have done 6 reps at 90%.
But my comments are not so much about Ben’s training. Its about the constant references to Ben as an example of someone who NEVER trained heavy, when his coach, one of the most respected sprint coaches in the world, suggests that perhaps he did. Certainly, he was training much closer to 90% than he was to 70% for some sets.