The Eighty Five Percent Rule For Optimal Learning & Fitness?
The 85% rule says learning is fastest when you succeed about 85% of the time — meaning roughly 15% of your attempts are still mistakes. Make a task too easy and you stop improving; make it too hard and you stall out. The same sweet spot applies to training: pick challenges you can hit most of the time, but not every time.
Key Takeaways
- The 85% rule comes from research showing certain learning is optimized at roughly an 85% success rate (about a 15% error rate).
- The principle: stay in a zone that's challenging but mostly achievable — not so easy it's boring, not so hard it's discouraging.
- Applied to fitness, it argues for picking weights, paces, and skills that push you while still letting you succeed most reps.
- It pairs naturally with the "86%" idea from Jerred's book Killing Comfort: deliberately living near the edge of your comfort zone.
Listen to the full episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast
This week Ashley is back! She joins Jerred and Joe as they look at a study that talks about the 85% rule. This seems to be the optimal way to learn and train in order to continue growth in both education and/or training. The team then talk about the 86% from Jerred's book Killing Comfort. Each give their takeaway from this chapter and why they find it useful in multiple aspects of life! This week's Meet Yourself Saturday is a special one. It's called DiCarlo and is dedicated to one of our athletes, Anne DiCarlo, who passed away from Leukemia. It's a breathing ladder so make sure you approach this one with the right mindset!
What the research says
The featured study, published in Nature Communications, set out to find the difficulty level that produces the fastest learning. For the class of tasks the researchers modeled, learning was most efficient when the training difficulty was tuned so the learner answered correctly about 85% of the time — equivalently, an error rate of roughly 15%. Below that error rate the material is too easy to drive much improvement; above it, it's hard enough to slow progress.
The practical translation for an athlete is intuitive: growth happens at the edge of your ability, not deep inside your comfort zone and not way past it. If you're nailing every rep effortlessly, it may be time to add load, speed, or complexity. If you're failing most attempts, the task is likely too hard to build skill efficiently — scale it back until you're succeeding most of the time. That's the same idea the team connects to the "86%" concept from Killing Comfort.
IN THIS 58-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
- The Eighty Five Percent Rule
- DiCarlo
- Optimal Learning and Fitness
- 86% from Killing Comfort
- Ashley's Back and Pregnant!
- Tips For MYS
- Updates and Announcements
- And A LOT MORE!!
Diving Deeper…
If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you:
Study of the Week
Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 85% rule?
It's the idea, from research on optimal learning, that you improve fastest when you succeed about 85% of the time — roughly a 15% error rate. That difficulty level keeps tasks challenging enough to drive learning without being so hard you stall.
How do I apply the 85% rule to my training?
Choose loads, paces, and skill work where you succeed on most attempts but still miss occasionally. If everything feels easy, add challenge; if you're failing most reps, scale back until you're hitting roughly four out of five.
Does the 85% rule apply to lifting weights specifically?
The original study looked at learning tasks rather than barbell training, so treat it as a guiding principle, not a precise prescription. The useful takeaway is to train at the productive edge of your ability rather than well within or far beyond it.
Related reading from Garage Gym Athlete
- What Is the Goldilocks Zone to Exercising?
- Choosing Your Own Weight Can Lead to Greater Strength
- How to Stick to a Program
Want programming that keeps you in that productive sweet spot week after week? Join Garage Gym Athlete.
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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!
To becoming better!
Jerred
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For ongoing daily training that exploits everything we have discusses here and more, check out Garage Gym Athlete.
