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.
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.