I’m at the end of the Beginner program (coming back from a shoulder injury) and I’m routinely nearing (or once egregious exceeding) RPE 10 for my sessions based on the calories burned according to my apple watch. My total calories burned usually had me around RPE 9 for my week 8s, but ever since I moved to week 9 and up, my RPE has shot up. Is it a sign I should lighten my loads rather than going off of the estimated weight based on percentages?
Based on calories burned? RPE is a scale of perceived exertion, so I’m not sure why calories would be considered exceeding estimates. RPE 10 is a max effort lift and anything beyond is simply failed.
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Yes, but in the template it has RPE for the session, and my sessions are technically hitting 10 and above
If you’re not literally hitting your absolute maxes on every set and if each session doesn’t feel like the most difficult workout you’ve ever done, you’re not hitting RPE 10 “and above”. “And above” would be failing sets every session or not completing your workouts due to fatigue. Calories are not a relevant metric in RPE estimation. What is your understanding of RPE?
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I mean they are brutal workouts. I understand that RPE for each set is about how many I estimate I have left in the tank, but on the template it has you input Session Time and Session RPE to calculate the calories you burned during the workout. For example, I went 70 minutes, estimating that I worked out at an RPE of 9 for those 70 minutes would give me an estimated calories burned of 630 since it is calculating RPE multiplied by minutes. I had one workout where I burned 740 calories in 65 minutes (which would be 11.5*65) another where I’m buring 723 in 70 minutes, which to get the session calculator to reflect that requires me to put 11 or 10 in that part of the spreadsheet
sRPE isn’t a direct mathematical calculation of minutes and calories that can be reverse calculated based on what an external device is telling you. sRPE is how your overall session feels, and how hard it was relative to other workouts you’ve done. You can’t have an sRPE of “11.5”, because that means you failed your workout. 11.5 is not on the RPE scale. Your caloric calculation estimate can’t reverse-engineer your sRPE, since RPE is a subjective report; that’s a needless complication potentially skewing your data.
I would enter sRPE first: how hard did the workout feel on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the absolute most difficult workout you’ve completed? After that, write down your session time. Worry about potential calories burned only after you’ve done that.
If you’re actually hitting RPE 9’s for workouts consistently I would expect you’re overshooting your set RPE on a regular basis, possibly depending on what template you’re running.
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