I’ve been loitering around the peripheral edges of Atheltica since the beginning of 2023 and must admit to dipping in and out of the platform throughout the year. This has mainly been down to the ‘fear of the unknown’ with regards to a new approach to my training but have decided to commit for the 2024 season.
Anyway, my feature request is as follows:
While I appreciate that RPE is very much subjective, I find the post workout RPE scale to be a little odd.
Ordinarily, I’d see 1-2 as a recovery ride, 3-4 as endurance pace, 5-6 as moderate, 7-8 as being hard efforts such as VO2 intervals, 9 as race-pace and 10 as sprint efforts (all out, everything you’ve got lasting only a few seconds).
Admittedly I’m looking at this as an MTB XC training point of view and appreciate that other athletes from other disciplines might not see it the same but on the post workout RPE drop-down box it has No.4 as 'somewhat hard’.
Should anyone see a 4/10 effort as ‘somewhat hard’?
Can the RPE scale be changed so the 1 - 10 numbers are useable without the accompanying text?
Thanks for taking the plunge with us @Matt. We use what is consider the gold standard sRPE method (Foster et al. 2001) which has been shown to be valid and reliable across multiple populations. We use this as a second method of calculating training load as is often done in the literature. Both the numbers and the text are important. You should look at the text first and align the associated number accordingly.
Bringing this back to life because I was thinking about while filling in the 12 individual activities that my swimrun imported as today.
In terms of scale, I’ve always considered Maximal or 10 as a six-second max type effort. So a full on sprint from a start, a dive and hard start in the pool etc.
It gets a little grey for me in the 4-8 range. What would representative efforts be for these? Where would an all out 1k on the track fit in?
I will throw my 2 cents here @Matt@MartinM@Prof, not because I’m an expert but just because I love discussing about RPE!
I have been schooled by Marcora and Impellizzeri on RPE, and I always found it confusing associating RPE with an intensity, so therefore here a distinction is needed.
SESSION RPE is what Athletica is asking at the end of the session [the link the Prof is referring to], is not equal to instant RPE. The former is an all-encompassing evaluation about how the entire session felt like, the latter is an instantaneous evaluation of the perceived effort.
By the very definition of RPE, if I do an all-out effort, at exhaustion my instantaneous RPE will be RPE=10. The feeling of “exhaustion” will be dictated by different causes, including the difference between “what I think I should have perceived” and my actual feelings. This is not related to the intensity or the duration of my effort. I can be at RPE=10 after an all out 1000 mt, or an all-out marathon. HOWEVER, if I run for 2 hours, and at the very beginning I did an all out 1000 mt, it is very unlikely that my session RPE will be 10 at the end of the 2 hours.
Session RPE changes with the time I report it, so therefore I should be pretty consistent when I report it (e.g. before/after the shower, etc. etc.), and it depends on the distributions of the efforts within the session itself (all out 1000 mt done at the beginning or at the end of the session).
PS: if I do an all-out effort and I am exhausted at RPE=8 (whatever < 10), well it means that I was not “actually” at RPE=10. I found it always convenient using RPE because you can always use this trick to justify an early exhaustion. There is a super interesting debate between this RPE model (e.g. see Marcora’s work) and who thinks that exhaustion is driven by a neuro-physiological response (e.g. see Ross Tucker’s work). I find it mesmerising. More info laid out simply can be found in a very nice book from Hutchinson, Endure, which I cannot recommend enough.
Thanks for this. Good point about the ‘whole workout’ rather than point in time. I’m pretty sure I under-score my workouts. Very rare that I go over 4 or 5 - maybe for a 5k TT on a scorching hot day I’ll put a 7? Now I’m thinking that if I finish a long Aerobic run on a hot day and I’m cooked, or a hard swim workout, I should probably be pushing up to that range as well…
I’m guessing consistency is the most important part of this, though.
Interestingly; even if you think that you are at 10 at 38k of a marathon, you can still have a little bit more in the tank for a 1000m kick to the Finish line. This would be instantaneous RPE, I guess.
The RPE is probably one of my favourite topics in Sports Science. Endure is an awesome book, and I love Marcora’s work. I use his “if you’re in pain during your efforts, smile to trick your brain”. It works, for me at least!
