As I’ve dug deeper into the RPE world, I came across RTS training and have to ask, are there any differences between BBM and RTS? I’d be interested in a discussion between the two camps. I can’t imagine they would disagree on much at all.
Mike T has been writing Jordan’s own training program for a fair amount of time, and the two of them have collaborated a bit. I know and chat with a couple of RTS coaches as well. We’re two different companies doing very similar things.
Quoted from The Bridge 1.0 PDF
Fast forward to the late 2000’s and enter the freaky strong and very intelligent Mike
Tuchscherer, owner of Reactive Training Systems. Mike was the first to apply RPE
principles to strength training as a way of selecting the weight for a given exercise on a
particular day. We would be remiss if we did not give credit where credit is due, as Mike
deserves a lot of praise for bringing this concept to strength sports. I am fortunate to
have called him both coach and friend.
The same appeared pretty much word for word in Jordan’s General Strength Training Template for Advanced/Intermediate article for Scivation about a year before he made The Bridge available.
As for differences, my relatively ignorant view is that judging by The Bridge which is designed as the free intro to BBM’s RPE based philosophy, they ease people into auto regulation by sticking to mostly using it to select the load. Auto regulation of the volume presumably comes further down the rabbit hole judging by the above linked Scivation article’s range of prescribed sets, but I’ve yet to come across a BBM rep using the term fatigue percents.
I’ve read a lot of the material over on the RTS website, and I’ve gotta say, just The Bridge’s usage of RPE has been daunting, so I think I prefer being eased into the auto regulation paradigm a little bit at a time. Considering a large part of the target audience for BBM is Rippetoe acolytes, and that paradigm finds program complexity sacrilegious, The Bridge is a good bridge into the BBM/RPE world for people like me.
BBM uses fatigue percents in 12-week strength and I haven’t come across any differences in training philosophy. That’s not a criticism btw, I just find this training stuff really interesting. I’ve tried the fatigue sets because they make sense in theory. But I think I need to get strict about time limits or decrease the percent dropped because it takes forever for the fatigue weight to reach RPE 9. This stuff definitely has a learning curve.
I hadn’t come across your topic asking about why not always auto regulate volume until after I wrote the above, but I think it gives my answer to that question pretty well.
Absolutely, thanks for your input.