What is RPE and how do I use it?

We explain the meaning of RPE and how it will help you to manage your training load

1.  What is RPE

2. Viewing RPEs and Workload Data

3. An athlete's view

RPE or rating of perceived exertion is a scale that is used subjectively to judge how hard a person is finding an exercise/task.

The scale is on a 1 to 10 basis with 1 being very easy and 10 being your maximal effort.

Whilst using the app you can ask your athletes to enter their RPE after a session.

If completed accurately and regularly it is a great measure of training load, working above a 7 RPE for an entire session multiple times per week may end up causing excessive fatigue and injury. It provides an opportunity for you to gauge a few insights:

Who is working at the appropriate intensity - athletes rate their RPE similar to your expected RPE

Who is coasting - an athlete consistently rates a low score/similar score

Who is working too hard/overrating their difficulty - an athlete consistently rates a high score

You are over/under estimating expected RPE - the whole group rate something similar to each other, but different to what you chose

RPE multiplied by session duration creates a workload score - this is the simplest way sports scientists monitor training load.

You can view spikes in training load in more detail and investigate whether it's due to an increase in RPE (a few hard sessions), or duration (more sessions/longer sessions in a week/month).

Viewing Workload

You can view individual workloads for this current week (far left table), the past few weeks (middle table) and the current acute chronic workload.

You can view the acute chronic ratio for each week, up to a year in the past.

You can view a single athlete's workload information in greater detail from the single athlete view tab.

Drilling up a layer on the graph gives a bigger picture view showing the average RPE has gone up, yet the duration has gone down in the month of September vs August, showing this athlete is working harder but for less time.

An athlete's view

Here is how an athlete fills in their RPEs