Ill start this off with an observation – Ive noticed that the real power athletes can lift much heaver for 1-3reps than they can for 5-10 reps, whereas the other athlete type don’t have such a large difference between the two. I call this power-reserve, and the larger the power reserve, generally the more explosive they are.
Actually power reserve would mean the opposite. If an athlete has high power or strength reserve, he can do more reps closer to his max. In other words, based on his 1RM, he can usually outperform the RM tables. I had discussions wit Charlie Francis about Ben on this very subject. Ben could do 6 reps with 600lbs., (actually looked like he was short of parallel on the videos I have seen) and Charlie said he didn’t think Ben could do much more for that. He was doing 6 reps at a weight that would be calculated to be more like a 3-4 rep max. I asked Charlie if this could be strength reserve resulting from Ben’s very high level of training, and he agreed, I think correlating to something like speed reserve.