Hello BBM crew!
I’ve been lifting for about 6 months now and had an experience today during my lifting session that led to the following question.
Is there high variability among individuals when it comes to expected RPE at different rep counts?
For example, today I was doing back squats at 275lbs for 6 reps @ rep 8. After completion of these sets, I could tell I was definitely at RPE 8, maybe RPE 8.5 if I was being conservative. However, the program called for a heavy single @ RPE 8 to start with, so using the RPE calculator I estimated that I should be lifting around 320lbs for this single. So I do the heavy single rep, but this ended up being a teeth grinding, 6 or 7 second ascent and was probably the most obvious RPE 10 I’ve ever done so far.
Just curious after my lifting session today why my heavy single should have felt like an RPE 8 based on my 6 rep sets, but it ended up being a true RPE 10.