Making Sense of RPE
Untangling the murkiness of assessing your lifts
The great RPE wars may never be fully settled, but having used it and not used it with hundreds of lifters each, and myself, and observed others doing both ways too, my position as of now is that it CAN be useful, but is often abused and misused, so should be treated with caution. A possibly useful tool that can be utilized, but can also easily be misused, and thus whether to use it or not should be decided on an individual basis. But that puts the cart before the horse. What is RPE?
What is RPE?
Defining RPE a bit murky too, as it’s used differently by different people under different circumstances. I’ve written two previous articles about RPE that are necessary background for further discussion here, so to avoid being repetitive, I will link them here with brief descriptions so you can get up to speed if you’re not already. In order:
Defining RPE in a consistent manner for when I talk about it, elaborating some slight differences from the way some others use it, and the inherent ‘squshiness’ of the metric that exists at its margins.
Finding Reasons to Work Hard vs Finding Excuses to Do Less:
Here I discuss the personality types suited to using RPE vs those not as well suited. I don’t say so explicitly, but if you’re someone who naturally finds reasons to do less, RPE (at least without a coach watching your lifts and giving feedback pretty often) will more likely lead to that outcome. This is most people, in my experience.
On the other hand if you’re someone who typically finds reasons to do more, work harder, and push - then RPE will likely be a productive tool to moderate your training and help you not do more than you should.
These are generalizations, but I’ve found them to be mostly correct thus far in the 9 years since I started working with RPE.
Elaborating Further
That said, even within that framework, there’s more to dig into to alleviate some murkiness.
What I wrote about RPE above, applies primarily to main lifts and their close variations. Lifts for which 1 rep maxes actually make sense. So in this regard, RPE in the sense I define it in the article above is just as applicable to a close grip bench as it is to a regular or competition style bench. Just as applicable to a high bar or safety bar squat as to a low bar squat, and to snatch grip deadlift or deficit or block pull as to a regular deadlift. A strict press as to a regular press. And so on.
Where it starts to get murky is when the variation becomes less amenable to a 1RM, or accessory lifts for which 1RMs don’t really make sense. Maybe something like a dumbbell bench, a tempo high bar squat, a Romanian deadlift. We don’t typically do those for 1RMs, and adjudicating down to the SINGLE rep exactly how many more reps we have in the tank becomes murkier.
It becomes murkier still, the further away you get from the main lift. You can always use a little more english, a little more swinging to get another rep of a bicep curl. You can always lean back a little further and short the ROM an inch to get another rep of a lat pulldown. You can always heave a little harder to get one more DB row. So how do you rate RPE for those?
Yes, it’s subjective, but still useful
In these cases, we must adopt a more subjective framework, due to the inherent nature and limits of the movement. But that doesn’t make it useless, it’s just the way evaluation applies to inherently less objectively defined movements. Is it really accurate to say that there’s NO way to assess these movements just because we can’t evaluate whether you could’ve cheated 1-2 more reps up? Do we really have to pretend not to know the difference between a hard, useful set of curls and an easy one that barely counts as work? I say no. Here’s the framework I use to evaluate these lifts using RPE, but assessed admittedly subjectively. If you’re honest, it works just fine.
RPE here is a bit more subjective, more like: "How hard was it?" rather than "Exactly how many reps did you have left?"
The answer to the former is more like:
RPE 10 = Extremely hard, max effort
RPE9 = Very hard, but not quite max
RPE 8= Hard, challenging set, but could definitely do more
RPE 7 = Bit of work but not too hard.
RPE 6 = Easy work set, barely hard enough to count as work. But still counts.
Sub 6 = Too easy to be work, counts as a warmup.
Example
My best DB bicep curl is 75 lbs for 8 reps, done not perfectly absolutely stock-strict, but without any major heaving or swinging. I can’t quite do that now, but was there late last year. At the time:
RPE 10 = 75x8
RPE 9.5 = 70x8
RPE 9 = 65x8
RPE 8 = 60x8
RPE 7 = 55x8
RPE 6 = 50x8
Sub 6 = 45 or below for 8 reps. If I just did 55x8x3, it would’ve been a bit of work, not zero count towards work at all. But of course MOST of my sets would’ve needed to be 60-65 to be productive, with 1-2 top sets per week at 75.
Beware the trap
The easy trap to fall into is rating your MAIN LIFTS this way. If you do that, you’re on the slippery slope to finding excuses to do less. But lifts for which true 1RMs are not a thing, you can rate the difficulty this way if you’re honest, and using a combination of the objective weight used and RPE, drive the weight up over time.
The key thing is always keeping the focus on that: DRIVING THE WEIGHT UP OVER TIME, with RPE being used as at tool to do so. The moment you start to view RPE maximizing as an end in and of itself, or an excuse to use less weight, is the moment you’ve already lost.