Session RPE

[Bishop]

After to listening to the latest podcast I plan on tracking session RPE for about 4 weeks or so to see what is my average score. Curious if others plan to track and how they will asses the RPE.

I was thinking that I will take the average of my work sets to evaluate. I am cautious to take a subjective measurement at the end in case iI have a tough last couple of sets and skew my view of the whole training session.

Other thoughts or ideas on how others plan to track?

[PWard]

I would not use an average RPE of your working sets. That is not session RPE. Session RPE is totally subjective, just at the end of the workout rate from 1-10 at how stressful the workout felt as a whole. Remember to take both intensity and volume into account, you could get a very high session RPE by training with all low RPE sets provided you do enough volume. For example, you could do a workout session where you keep doing bench sets of [email protected] with 2 minute rest periods, and eventually you will reach a point that your muscles will turn to jelly and you will not be able to complete another set of [email protected] even with the empty bar. It may take 20 or more sets in a row to get there, but it's totally possible to get a session RPE of 10 without doing a single set over @6. So as you can see, set RPE is not correlated directly to session RPE.

[tfranc]

Yeah I would just try to think subjectively about your training experience after you’ve cooled down

[Dave_E]

Once you have accrued this data, how do you plan on implementing it?

[cmoney]

I've done a much more crude exercise in the past, based on Paul Carter's suggestion of all people. Basically, days are either 80% days, +10% days, or -10% days. Or more simply, average days, great days, or suck days. If enough suck days string up in a row, things need evaluating.

I've started tracking Session RPE just out of curiosity. I generally grade it a few minutes after my final set (changing shoes, washing hands, etc). So far they've all been pretty middling 5s-6s. No idea what I'll do with the data.