Session RPE

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?

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 8@6 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 8@6 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.

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

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

You don’t make any changes or implement anything until you need to. I think it’s mainly there so you can go back in time and try to pull patterns out. I wouldn’t use it to adjust training at all in and of itself, until there is enough data that can show that when x case happens, there’s a high probability of z effect happening.

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.