Live Q&A 6 2023: Bashing Rating of Perceived Exertion | What the critics of this rating system get wrong
IS RATING OF PERCEIVED EXERTION IN BARBELL TRAINING BAD? MANY CRITICS BASH THE USE OF RATING OF PERCEIVED EXERTION BUT WE’RE HERE TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF WHY IT’S BASHED AND WHY RPE ISN’T SO BAD.
Rating of Perceived Exertion is often misunderstood and assumed to only be used one way. We often agree with their opinion of its use to prescribe loads or as the only assessment of performance is incorrect. That’s NOT how we use, or advocate using, RPE!
In this episode of the PRS Podcast, we talk about descriptive versus prescriptive rating of perceived exertion and how to effectively use the rating scale along with video analysis, the coach’s RPE, and a complete understanding of the lifter as a whole.
Rating of Perceived Exertion, when used descriptively alone with a full assessment of performance and the lifter, can serve as a measure of recovery and performance by being used to calculate and track an estimated 1 rep max that is more realistic and resembles what someone may actually be able to do on that day. It also takes the guesswork out of writing programs and making adjustments and allows you to make more informed decisions proactively and before training goes awry.
Using Rating of Perceived Exertion is part of responsible coaching intended to reduce the risk of injury and improve performance long term. We use it to enhance coaching and add another layer of information to base decisions off of. So, though many people bash the use of Rating of Perceived Exertion, we often agree with their opinions because that’s not how we recommend using it.
Listen to this episode to learn more about all the ways that Rating of Perceived Exertion can be used and how it can serve to optimize training and enable the implementation of effective and responsible coaching.
Resources:
Sustainable Training Builder (Free)
RPE in Powerlifting: What is RPE? + How to Use Rating of Perceived Exertion Optimally (Article)
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Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:00:10] All right. Moving on to our next question. This question comes from Lane, folks. He actually asked this question for an interview we did with Eric Helms. But when we sent out the question requests for that interview, we asked specifically to ask questions on the injury that we were interviewing him for. So we didn't ask him this question because it didn't pertain to the interview that we were doing. So we wanted to answer that question here for you guys today. So, Alyssa, what do you think vocal critics of RPE get wrong? What do they get right?
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC, CSCS: [00:00:56] So I think a lot of the time what they get wrong is how they're talking about it, so how they're talking about its use. In my experience, I've heard a lot of critics talk about RPE. In a way, I talk negatively about it in a way that we're not using it. So the way that we use here at PRS is we use descriptive. We use it as a rating system to tell us how hard a set was. It helps us get an idea of how hard our clients thought a set was. And it also helps us when we're looking at a list or a video, you know, quantify or think, okay, how hard does this look? Now, we're not necessarily always going through and saying like, well, we're going to log our RPE for that client, but it's just how we think about it. How hard was it? And then that's going to guide program changes and yeah.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:02:00] And I want to I'm going to do a lot of interrupting on this one because, you know, this is something that I'm very passionate about. And recently public very publicly. People have spoken out about this, specific to things that I put out in content where they clearly misinterpreted everything that I said. And what I want to be clear with the statement that you just made, Alyssa, is that we are not only relying on RPE, and I think that is where yes, people don't are get it wrong in the sense that they use prescriptively. So they're not writing, they're not they're using it to choose loads. But what we do, like you said, is we use it descriptively. We're giving a client a load to do. We're not saying whatever you feel like doing today do. We're saying here is the load that you're going to do today. Tell me how it feels. And you can say hard. You can say easy. You can say It was kind of hard, you know, Oh, it's getting hard, you know, all that stuff. But that's not really quantifiable. And we like and we understand what that means. But when we're looking at things over time and we want to track a person's response to training over time and we want to see did 225 feel really hard to them a month ago when they did it? And today when they're doing 225 again, it feels really easy. That's progress.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:03:36] Right? And we're not and like you said, Alyssa, we're also using it as coaches to quantify what we're seeing. Right. And when we quantify what we're seeing, what they're feeling, we can make better training decisions, but we're not using it without looking at the videos, without seeing their lifts in person. Okay. Yeah, in person, might you say like, Oh yeah, that looked hard. I don't need to give that an RPE maybe. Okay. We don't have to give it an because we're here, you know, like whatever. I do use it in person though, because it's helpful to, to be, it's helpful to speak the same language because what hard feels like for you might not be the same thing that what hard feels like for me. So we're able to create a uniform language that we can all communicate what we're seeing because we can't. And I think that this is where other coaches or critics of RPE get wrong is it's not appropriate, in my professional opinion, as someone who has worked as a physical therapist and strength training coach, who has worked with people who are constantly injured by grinding into the ground, I do not think that it's appropriate to dismiss someone's feelings of how hard something feels on a particular day, because if you dismiss those feelings, they're much more liable to get injured over time or even in that training session. Um, so I'm going to go on a lot of these rants.