I’ve had some pretty good success with your programs and have switched to regularly using your whey supplements so please don’t interpret this as me being a detractor. I’m a supporter and have turned others on to your programs.
One area that seems a bit confusing to me from a principle standpoint is how subjective assessments are advocated in some domains but not others. For example, RPE is a staple of your programs and you point to lots of good evidence to support it. But then you’ll mention that you don’t advocate using sleep monitors because they may inadvertently influence someone to a lower performance if it shows they had a “bad” nights sleep.
How do we reconcile these two perspectives? On one hand it seems like we’re saying people are good at subjectively assessing their performance and on the other we’re saying there’s a lot of subtle influences that unwittingly affect that subjective assessment. It also seems like there’s considerable behavioral psychology that affects the interpretations of our subjective experience (speaking only as a layman, from reading books from authors like Kahneman and Mlodinow).
Thanks for the post. To your question, RPE is a subjective metric used to help us rate how hard an effort is and, based on the value, tell us what to do next. On the other hand, sleep monitors provide objective information regarding sleep quality, duration, and more with varying levels of accuracy and precision. In addition to clear problems measuring what they set out to, the data provided by sleep monitors is not reliably correlated with performance across the population. In other words, while RPE has been shown to be an important factor with regards to load management, sleep data, as measured by wearable tech, does not reliably influence training performance or load tolerance. There are a number of things that affect RPE, yes, but the actual user rating is more important on managing fatigue than the absolute value. That’s why we think it’s so important.
I don’t really view this as two separate perspectives. Rather, one is a subjective metric that can be used with a good amount of precision to help control important parameters of a program. The other is an objective metric that does not reliably tell us anything actionable.
Thanks, Dr. Feigenbaum. That makes a lot of sense, especially if the objective measure is using too generalized of a model to be of much specific use. I guess to be a bit more pointed in my question, how can we be confident in our subjective assessments when they are so easily swayed by outside factors (like reading objective metrics from a bad model)? I would assume (maybe wrongly) that my subjective RPE is made irrespective of external measurements and so it shouldn’t be influenced by them. Is it just a matter of learning to hone our RPE estimates?
There is an assumption that RPE accuracy maters a lot with respect to training outcomes. However, it is far more important that the RPE is precise in its ability to capture how hard the effort feels to you on a given day. Using the same scale with the same factors taken into consideration is the key here.
