How to Use RPE for Strength Training
A few weeks ago, I interrupted my powerlifting routine to run a half marathon. I raced with all my might and woke up the next day with a lethal case of delayed muscle soreness . But it was a tough day, so I dragged my aching ass to the gym and started working out as usual. And it was nice and easy thanks to RPE.
RPE stands for Perceived Load Assessment and is used in various ways in fitness. (You may be familiar with the Borg scale, for example, for assessing how hard you work during cardio.)
How to judge RPE
In the lift, we use RPE to gauge how heavy a set seems to be in an exercise. For example, suppose you are working on a leg press machine and are barely doing an eight-rep set (you move the weight eight times). You have failed ; You won’t be able to do another rep even if I magically appeared next to the leg press machine and offered you money. This is 10, the highest point on the scale.
It doesn’t matter how many reps were in the set. Whether you did a hundred bicep curls with a can of soup, or one giant deadlift, if you finished your very last rep and had nothing left, your effort was 10.
The rest of the scale is based on the same idea: how many reps you had “in the tank”:
- RPE 10 – Can’t do another rep. This is the maximum effort.
- RPE 9 – You could barely do another rep, but you didn’t. The work you did was really hard.
- RPE 8 – You could do two more reps. It was a tough set, but not a killer.
- RPE 7 – You could do three more reps. This set was not particularly difficult. You have worked, you are done, now you are ready for more.
- RPE 6 – You could do four more reps. It was not difficult at all.
RPE is not worth evaluating below 6. When you walk into the gym and start your squat day with a bodyweight or empty bar warm-up, it could be 2 or 3, but you don’t need to worry about it – just think about this warm-up set. , without a number.
How to use workouts written for RPE
What’s the point of RPE? Aside from making you wonder how difficult the approach really is , there is another very useful aspect: lifting routines can be written using RPE as the only guideline for how much weight to lift. For example, the squat workout I did the day after the start of the race is programmed like this:
- 6 reps in RPE 6
- 6 reps in RPE 7
- 6 reps with RPE 8
- 6 reps 10% less than anything I’ve done with RPE 8.
This was not a problem despite the pain in my buttocks, because I was not told to lift a certain weight – only a certain level of effort. My weight was lower than usual that day, but that’s okay.
And that’s the beauty of RPE: what you actually lift can change from day to day because you, as a person, are different every day. In programs that required lifting a specific weight, I tried to lift the weight that day no matter how I felt, and if I was sick or tired, I might have trouble finishing sets and be frustrated. With RPE training, ups and downs are expected as you listen to your body. (Your weight will increase over time.)
How to get used to RPE
RPE is hard to get used to, so let’s talk about some pitfalls. First, you need to know what “one more rep in the tank” is. It is impossible to learn this except by experience.
If you started with a program like Starting Strength, which pushes you to lift more weight each week, you probably learned this feeling very quickly. And in fact, if you’re used to a program like this (or something like CrossFit, where there is pressure to exhaust yourself), RPE 8 training may seem like a vacation. It takes a little getting used to.
Feedback from a coach or friend can help. No one can know for sure the level of effort you personally feel, but an experienced coach may be skeptical about your RPE 8 effort if you can lift weights effortlessly. I videotape my exercises to send to an online trainer, and even watching them myself is amazing. Particularly when it comes to deadlifts, I tend to think that I am working extra hard , but then I watch the video and realize that I probably had more reps in the tank than I thought. I’ve only been working with RPE for a month or two; experience will help you more accurately determine the level of your efforts.
Until then, you can use an RPE calculator like this to predict the correct weight to lift at a given RPE. You enter the famous RPE exercise at the top: if your max deadlift is 225, you would enter 225 pounds, 1 rep, RPE 10. Then, at the bottom, you specify how many reps and which RPE you are doing. for: Let’s say you need to do six reps in RPE 8. According to the calculator, a reasonable weight would be 175. This gives you an idea of what barbell weights to use for this set, but the only person who knows how RPE you really feel is …