Progressing With RPE

Drs.,

When you have a “bad” day and your E1RM actually goes down when compared to the previous week for a movement, how do you go about the goal weight selection for the next week? Are you trying to beat the “bad” performance E1RM by a little bit, try to go somewhere in the middle between that and your previous best performance, or are you trying to beat your most recent PR E1RM? I guess if you’re truly using RPE correctly it wouldn’t really matter and the autoregulation itself select the weight you should handle and over time it will improve. I was just curious to see how you handle this in your own training and how you set your targets for the next week based on this type of situation.

It depends on why you had that “bad” day. Sometimes it really was just a bad day and your weight selection was just a little low, next week you’re fine to push your e1RM up again. Other times, I head it and after that not so great session, I just need to improve that last e1Rm. The point is to continue to make long-term progress, not to get hung up on one session, as those session happen no matter what type of training you use. I think it also depends on your training advancement. If you are asking what most of us coaches would do, keep in mind the docs are seeing e1RMs go up over months, not week to week. I’m looking at e1RMs trending up a kg over several weeks. But if you’re a newer lifter, you’re e1RM is moving up much faster and at larger jumps.

1 Like

Leah,

Thank you for your response. As you said, the more advanced training status yourself, Jordan, and Austin make these decisions a bit different. I guess I was just thinking about it for myself, as I have come across this situation with my deadlift after having steady progression week to week for the later part of the bridge into now the 12-week strength after getting the kinks worked out with the initial shift to RPE. Just had a bad day yesterday and my e1RM dropped like 30-40 pounds. Now that I think about it, I really doesn’t matter how I set my target weights because if the single @8 isn’t @8 yet then I would keep adding weight to the bar and eventually getting to the appropriate weight. This over time would probably “fix” the issue. Thanks again for all of your content, it has been incredibly helpful.