A powerlifting attempt planner takes your recent maxes or training maxes and turns them into an opener, a second attempt, and a third attempt for the squat, bench press, and deadlift. Instead of scribbling percentages on the back of your notebook the week before a meet, you type in one number per lift and get all nine competition attempts laid out and rounded to weights the loaders can actually build. This page explains how attempt selection works, how to use the ToolFiddle tool step by step, and how to walk onto the platform with a plan you trust.
Picking attempts is one of the few parts of powerlifting that has nothing to do with how strong you are and everything to do with judgment. Two lifters with the same squat can walk away with very different totals purely because one chose well and the other got greedy. The math is not hard, but doing it under pressure, in a noisy warm-up room, with sixty seconds on the clock to hand your next number to the table, is where people slip. A planner does the arithmetic ahead of time so meet day becomes a matter of executing, not calculating.
What a powerlifting attempt planner does
At its core, the tool converts a single reference number for each lift into three weights. You give it your best recent squat, bench, and deadlift, and it applies the standard attempt percentages: a conservative opener, a strong second, and a stretch third. Then it rounds each result to a legal loading step so you are never staring at a number like 141.3 kg that cannot be built on a competition bar.
The reference number can be a true recent single, the heaviest clean rep you have hit in the last few weeks, or a training max, a slightly conservative figure many programs use in place of an all-out max. Either is fine. What matters is that you know which one you typed, because a true max and a training max lead to slightly different attempts, and the confidence setting in the tool is there to close that gap for you.
The output is a full attempt sheet: three squats, three benches, three deadlifts, nine numbers in total. That is exactly what the scoring table wants from you, and it is exactly what a coach or a handler needs to help you make good calls between lifts. Having it worked out in advance is the difference between a calm warm-up and a scramble.
Who this is for
First-time competitors get the most out of a planner, because attempt selection is the part of meet prep that no amount of training in the gym teaches you. You can squat a big number in training and still bomb your first meet by opening too heavy. A planner gives a beginner the guardrails that an experienced coach would otherwise provide.
It is just as useful for seasoned lifters who simply want a fast, reliable starting point. Experienced competitors still run the same percentages; they just have a better feel for when to deviate. Using a powerlifting attempt planner saves them the arithmetic and gives them a clean baseline they can then tweak by feel.
Coaches and handlers use it too. If you are running the warm-up room for several lifters at once, having each athlete's nine attempts written out keeps the whole day organized. And remote coaches can send an athlete a set of numbers to check against the tool so everyone agrees on the plan before the platform ever comes into play.
How attempt selection works: opener, second, third
Attempt selection follows a simple logic that has held up across decades of meets. Each of the three attempts has a distinct job, and understanding those jobs is more important than memorizing exact percentages.
The opener exists to guarantee a number on the board. Its target is roughly 90 to 92 percent of your best single, though plenty of coaches nudge a nervous first-timer down toward 88 to 90 percent. The test is simple: could you make this weight for a smooth single on a bad day, tired, under bright lights, waiting on the judges' commands? If the answer is not an easy yes, it is too heavy. A good opener is something you might triple in the gym on a normal Tuesday.
The second attempt is your gauge. It usually lands around 96 to 98 percent of your best, a strong single that often sits close to a recent personal record. This is the lift that gives you real information about the day. It should be heavy enough to matter but still a lift you expect to make. Crucially, how it moves decides your third. A second that shoots up tells you there is more in the tank; a second that turns into a grind tells you to keep the last jump modest.
The third attempt is the reach. It sits near 101 to 103 percent of your best and is ideally a lifetime record if the day has gone your way. The single most important rule in all of attempt selection is that you choose the third after you see the second, not before. Pre-planning a heroic third and taking it regardless of how the second felt is how lifters miss and lose weight off their total. Let the second attempt write the third.
Because the third is the goal, the ToolFiddle planner treats it as the anchor and works backwards. The opener lands near 90 percent of that goal and the second near 96 percent of it, which is the same spread coaches have used for decades, just expressed from the top down rather than the bottom up.
The nine attempts explained
A full-power meet gives you nine attempts: three on squat, three on bench, three on deadlift, contested in that fixed order. Only your best made lift on each of the three counts, and those three bests add up to your total, which is what determines placing.
That structure shapes strategy in a specific way. Because only your best counts, a missed third does no direct harm to your total as long as you already made a good second. This is why the classic pattern is a safe opener, a second you are confident in, and a third that stretches. You are never risking your whole day on one number. You lock in a total early, improve it on the second, and gamble only the last attempt, where a miss costs you nothing you had already banked.
The flip side is the danger of bombing out. Miss all three on any one lift and you have no total at all, no matter how well the other two lifts went. A 250 kg squat and a 300 kg deadlift mean nothing if you went zero for three on the bench. That single risk is why every experienced lifter treats the opener as sacred and why a planner leans conservative on that first number.
How to use the ToolFiddle powerlifting attempt planner
The tool is built to be quick, so you can run it in the days before a meet or recheck it in the warm-up room.
- Choose your unit. Set kilograms if your meet is contested in kilos, which most sanctioned meets are, or pounds if you are lifting at a pounds-based event. This controls the rounding, so it matters. Switching units converts the numbers you already typed.
- Enter your reference max for each lift. Put in your best recent squat, bench, and deadlift as a single. Leave a lift blank if you are only planning one of them.
- Pick how the day should go. First meet keeps the third level with your best. Standard adds a small record on top. Peaking assumes the number you typed is a conservative training max and that your real ceiling sits about 5 percent higher.
- Read your nine attempts. Each lift gets its own column with the opener, second, and third drawn as a rising staircase, labelled with the percentage of your goal third and the plates to hang on each side of the bar.
- Check the totals. The headline figure is your projected meet total if all three thirds land. Underneath it you can see what the three openers alone bank, and how much upside sits above them.
- Sanity-check the openers. Look at each opener and ask the honest question: would I make this ten times out of ten, even feeling terrible? If any opener gives you pause, drop it a step or switch to the first-meet setting. The tool gives you a strong default, but you know your own worst day better than any percentage does.
- Copy the sheet. One button puts all nine attempts, the percentages, and the plate loads on your clipboard, ready for your attempt cards or a message to your coach.
A worked example in kilograms
Suppose a lifter walks in with a recent best squat of 200 kg, bench of 140 kg, and deadlift of 240 kg, and chooses the standard setting. Here is how the planner lays out the nine attempts.
For the squat, the goal third is 205 kg, a touch over 102 percent and a small personal record. The opener lands at 185 kg, about 90 percent of that goal and an easy single for this lifter. The second comes in at 197.5 kg, roughly 96 percent of the goal, a strong lift near their best.
For the bench, the goal third is 142.5 kg, just over the old best. The opener is 127.5 kg, a comfortable single. The second is 137.5 kg, again around 96 percent of the goal and the lift that decides whether the third gets taken as planned.
For the deadlift, the goal third is 245 kg. The opener is 220 kg, near 90 percent of it, and the second is 235 kg. Each of those is a legal 2.5 kg number, so the loaders can build every one of them without a moment's hesitation.
Add the openers and this lifter already has 532.5 kg banked the moment those three lifts go up. Add the thirds, if they all land, and the total reaches 592.5 kg. The gap between those two figures is the swing that good attempt selection protects. A safe opener guarantees the first number, and everything above it is upside earned one careful jump at a time.
A worked example in pounds
The same logic works in pounds, with rounding to the nearest 5 pounds. Take a lifter who benches a best single of 225 lb. On the standard setting the goal third comes out at 230 lb, a new record if the second moves well. The opener lands near 205 lb, a shade under 90 percent of that goal and a comfortable 91 percent of the old best, so it is a clean rep on any day. The second sits at 220 lb, roughly 96 percent of the goal and close to the recent best.
Notice how the jumps shrink as the bar gets heavier: 15 pounds from opener to second, then only 10 to the top, and smaller still if the lifter decides to be cautious. That tapering pattern, bigger early jumps and smaller ones near the ceiling, shows up on almost every well-chosen attempt sheet, whether you count in kilos or pounds.
Real-world use cases
The clearest use case is a first meet. A new competitor has trained hard, knows their gym numbers, and has no idea how to translate them into openers. The planner does that translation and, just as importantly, keeps the openers honest so the athlete does not throw away months of work on an over-ambitious first squat.
A second common case is a lifter chasing a specific total, maybe a qualifying total for a bigger meet or a number that beats a rival. Here the planner helps you see, before you ever load the bar, whether your current maxes can realistically reach that total across nine attempts, and where the margin is.
Coaches handling several athletes on the same day use it to standardize. Rather than doing percentages in their head between flights, they have every lifter's sheet ready and can focus on the live decision that actually needs a human: watching the second attempt and calling the third.
There is also the pure planning case, weeks out from a meet, where you want to model different scenarios. What do my attempts look like if my squat comes up another 5 kg in the final block? Running those numbers early helps you set training targets that feed directly into a stronger meet-day sheet.
Tips for choosing smart attempts
Open lighter than your ego wants. The most common regret after a meet is an opener that was too heavy, not too light. A missed opener is a genuine emergency; a slightly easy one costs you nothing, because your best lift is what counts and you have two more tries above it. This is also why the tool only ever rounds an opener down, never up.
Let the second attempt decide the third. This is worth repeating because it is the single highest-value habit in the sport. Watch the bar speed on your second. Fast and clean means reach for the record. Slow and ugly means take a small, safe jump so you still improve your total rather than missing.
Keep your early jumps larger and your late jumps smaller. Moving from opener to second can be a healthy 6 to 8 percent, but the climb from second to third should usually be a smaller 4 to 6 percent, because you are now near your true limit where small changes in load feel huge. The planner prints both jumps under each lift column so you can see the taper.
Plan around the flight and the clock. Once you complete a lift you typically have about sixty seconds to submit your next attempt to the table. Knowing your intended second and third in advance means you are not doing panicked math while a volunteer waits with a pen. The planner exists precisely so that moment is calm.
Write your openers down and commit them early. Openers are often submitted before the session begins, so treat them as fixed the night before. The place for on-the-day feel is the third attempt, not the opener.
Common mistakes to avoid
The biggest mistake is treating a meet like a max-out session in the gym. In training you can miss a rep, rest, and try again with no consequence. On the platform a miss burns one of only three attempts, so the whole approach shifts toward banking made lifts rather than hunting a single big number.
A related error is planning the third attempt in advance and refusing to change it. If your second attempt was a grind and you still call the pre-planned record third, you are very likely to miss and add nothing. Flexibility on the third is not weakness; it is how you maximize the total.
Another trap is forgetting that attempts cannot go down within a lift. Once the meet starts, you can repeat a missed weight but never ask for less, so an opener you are unsure about has no safety net beneath it. This rule is the entire reason a conservative opener is non-negotiable.
People also mix up training numbers and meet numbers. If you feed the planner an inflated gym max that you hit once with questionable depth, your openers will be too heavy. Use a number you have hit cleanly and recently, to real competition standards, and your whole sheet becomes more trustworthy. If your number is a deliberately conservative training max instead, say so with the peaking setting rather than typing a figure you have not actually lifted.
Finally, do not ignore weight cuts and fatigue. If you cut weight to make your class, or if your bench simply comes after a hard squat session on the platform, your true capacity on the day may be a little below your best training single. When in doubt, shade every attempt slightly lighter and let the second attempt reveal how much you really have.
Bombing out and why openers stay conservative
Bombing out is the outcome every attempt planner is quietly designed to prevent. Because your total requires at least one made lift in each of the three movements, a single lift where you go zero for three erases the entire day. The mathematics are brutal: it does not matter how strong your other lifts were.
That asymmetry is why the opener is chosen so conservatively. The downside of an opener that is 5 kg too light is trivial, since your best attempt is what scores and you have two heavier tries queued up. The downside of an opener that is 5 kg too heavy can be a bomb-out and a wasted meet. When the costs are that lopsided, the rational choice is always to err toward the safe side, and a good planner encodes that bias into its default of around 90 percent rather than something closer to your true max.
There is a psychological benefit too. Making your opener cleanly settles the nerves, gets you used to the commands and the platform, and lets you attack the second and third with confidence. A missed opener does the opposite: it rattles you and forces you to repeat a weight you should have breezed. Banking that first lift is as much about your head as your total.
Training max, recent max, and RPE
The number you feed the planner deserves a moment of thought. A true recent max is the cleanest input, because the standard attempt percentages were built around a genuine one-rep maximum. If the heaviest honest single you have hit in the last few weeks is 200 kg, that is your reference, and the percentages fall out directly.
Many modern programs, though, do not have you max out in training. Instead they use a training max, a deliberately conservative figure, often around 90 percent of your true max, that keeps everyday work sustainable. If that is the number you have, remember that your real ceiling is higher, so you can afford to push your attempts up. That is exactly what the peaking setting does: it lifts the goal third about 5 percent above the figure you typed and moves the opener and second with it.
RPE, or rating of perceived exertion, is another useful lens. Many lifters describe a good opener as something around a 7 on the RPE scale, a weight with a few reps left in reserve, a comfortable single. A second attempt often feels like an 8 or 9, hard but makeable, and a third is a true 9.5 to 10, everything you have. If you train with RPE, you can cross-check the planner's percentage-based numbers against how those loads actually feel, and trust the plan more as a result.
Legal increments and plate math
Competition bars are loaded in fixed steps, so every attempt you take has to land on a legal number. In kilogram meets that step is 2.5 kg for normal attempts, dropping to 0.5 kg only for official record attempts. In pounds-based meets the bar is loaded to the nearest 5 pounds. A weight like 187.3 kg simply cannot be built, so the planner rounds every suggestion to a value the loaders can assemble.
This is more than a formality. Rounding changes your real percentages slightly, and it also affects how the plates go on the bar, which is worth visualizing before you lift. That is why each attempt in the tool prints its plate load per side, calculated from a 20 kg bar with 2.5 kg collars in kilos or a 45 lb bar in pounds. Knowing that your 197.5 kg second attempt means a specific stack per side helps you and your handlers load quickly and check the bar. Our plate loading calculator goes deeper if you want to plan warm-up loads the same way.
Rounding also nudges your strategy. Because you can only move in 2.5 kg jumps, the choice between, say, a 2.5 kg and a 5 kg jump on your third is a real decision, not a smooth slider. A planner makes those discrete options visible so you can pick the jump that best matches how the second attempt moved. If you would rather keep every number round, the loading step control lets you plan in 5 kg or 10 lb jumps instead.
Your numbers stay on your device
The maxes you type into this powerlifting attempt planner are personal, and some lifters would rather not broadcast exactly what they are opening with before a meet. That is why the tool runs entirely in your browser. The squat, bench, and deadlift figures you enter are handled by code on your own device, and none of them are sent to a server, stored in an account, or logged anywhere we can see.
There is no profile building up a history of your training, no email tied to your numbers, and nothing shared with any third party. If you closed your connection right after the page loaded, the planner would keep working, which is the clearest sign that your data never needed to leave the device in the first place. Your meet plan is yours alone.
Genuinely free, with no account
This planner is free in the full sense, not the trial sense. There is no sign-up wall, no email capture, and no premium tier that hides the useful parts. You will not calculate your openers only to be told that seeing your thirds requires an upgrade, because nothing here is locked.
That stands apart from some meet-prep tools and apps that gate attempt sheets, saved profiles, or an ad-free view behind a subscription. We keep the whole thing open, and there is no cap on how many times you can run it. Model a dozen scenarios for a dozen lifters if you like; the powerlifting attempt planner does not count your uses or ask for a card.
Instant and unlimited by design
Because the planning happens on your device, your attempts appear the instant you enter your maxes. There is no spinner while a request travels to a server and back, no queue at busy times near a big meet, and no drag from the heavy advertising scripts that clog so many free calculators. The page is kept deliberately light, so it loads fast even on an old phone tethered to a weak signal in a warm-up room.
That speed is the point. You want to check a number, tweak a max, and see the new sheet at once, especially when you are deciding a third attempt with the clock running. A tool that does one job quickly and stays out of your way is worth far more on meet day than a feature-stuffed app that makes you wait.
Works on any device, even offline
The planner behaves the same on a phone in your gym bag, a tablet on the coach's lap, or a laptop at home while you plan the week. The three lift columns stack on a narrow screen and sit side by side on a wide one, so the nine attempts stay readable when you glance at a phone between lifts or review a full sheet at your desk. Once the page has loaded, everything runs on your device, so a dead signal in a concrete warm-up hall does not stop you rechecking your numbers. Nothing depends on a particular brand of browser, as long as it is reasonably modern.
Related ToolFiddle tools
A smart attempt sheet is only half of meet-day math, so this tool sits next to a few companions. The warm-up ladder planner builds the ramp of lighter sets that gets you from the empty bar up to your opener without burning out before you lift. The plate loading calculator shows exactly which plates go on each side to build any weight, so your handlers load fast and correctly. The unit converter moves cleanly between kilograms and pounds if you train in one and compete in the other. The DOTS calculator turns the projected total on your sheet into a score you can compare across bodyweights, and the countdown timer is useful for tracking the rest between attempts and flights. Each one keeps your information on your device, just like this planner.
A quick recap
A powerlifting attempt planner converts your recent maxes or training maxes into an opener, a second, and a third attempt for squat, bench, and deadlift, then rounds each to a legal loading step. Open around 90 to 92 percent with a weight you would make on your worst day, take a strong second near 96 to 98 percent to gauge the day, and reach for a third around 101 to 103 percent that you decide only after watching the second. Plan all nine attempts in advance, protect yourself against bombing out with a safe opener, and let the second attempt write the third. The ToolFiddle version does the math instantly, prints the plates for every attempt, keeps your numbers private, and works free on any device, even with no signal in the warm-up room.