Looking forward to the forum! Quick questions, are the last few sets on the bridge (for example Week 4 Bench at 5x5@8) meant to be sets across with the first set starting at RPE 8, or should one deload a few pounds to stay @8 for all 5 sets? I’ve been doing the latter. Thanks!
Yessir, these are sets across ideally. I think sets @ 8 are mostly repeatable when given 4-5 min rest.
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apologies for Noobness, but what are “sets across”? 
Thanks for the response, but I just don’t see how I could do sets across at more then 2-3 sets and maintain the same RPE. On the weeks that have some lifts at 4-5 sets, I feel like dropping the weight is the only way to get all the sets in. That or just kill the remaining sets if the RPE hits 9 as you demonstrated in your blog for the generalized training template.
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Jordan, I’m genuinely interested in this: how did you expect people reading the ebook to know that you repeat the sets with @ 8 but lower the weight each set with @ 9 (that’s my impression so far)? My guess is that your answer is that it doesn’t matter as long as each set is RPE 8, it might differ between trainees, and you’d figure out soon enough if lowering the weight takes the RPE too low. I don’t think that’s true at all though; the RPE system seems more like a way of matching your expectations with reality (e.g. “usually it moves quicker than this”) than any kind of genuine consistent and accurate rating.
For example, from your log, you did SSB Squat: 465 x 1 @ 7, 505 x 1 @ 8, 455 x 4, 445 x 4, 425 x 4. So according to the table in the ebook, 505 x 1 @ 8 implies an e1RM of 549. Which means your 465 x 1 was 85%, which should be far lower than a 7 for a single. So if the table is junk and ‘@ 7’ just means ‘how my opener normally feels before I jump up a bit more for my @ 8 set’, that’s fine, but it means that it’s extremely difficult for this ‘feeling’ to be conveyed to anybody else, and it seems that having more prescriptive statements (“do your @ 8 sets across”) allows for more consistency than pretending the RPE system is a consistent way to get this message across.
If this is all covered elsewhere, maybe a required reading list would work? There are dozens of similar questions (e.g. about how to find the right weight, how to progress, etc) that are left completely unclear as it stands. I ask this stuff not to complain but because I’d like to do the program but have far too many questions to just ask them one by one here. The whole thing needs explaining in a more algorithmic way. Based on the response to RPE on the SS forums, I think there’s lots of people in a similar boat.
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Thanks, Awk. We will try to make some improvements in the explanation when we get around to updating the Bridge ebook.
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