Ep. #321: The Complete Guide to the RPE Scale (and How to Use It)

Now, a major part of that smart workout programming was incorporating RPE into my strength workouts because it gives you a simple, reliable, and scientific way to decide how hard you’re going to push yourself to progress.

Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscleful Life and Legion Athletics, and welcome to another episode of the Muscleful Life Podcast. And this time around, I want to talk about RPE, which stands for Rating of Perceived Exertion, and which is a very practical and handy tool that you can use. to make sure that you are progressing in your weightlifting workouts.

And the reason why progression is so important, in fact it’s one of the most important aspects of weightlifting, is it really makes the difference between exercise, which is just moving your body to burn calories and improve your health, and training, which is exercising according to a plan designed to produce very specific long term outcomes.

Progression is the key to avoiding stagnation in your muscle and strength gain and to breaking through the many plateaus that will occur throughout your fitness journey, no matter how strict you are with your diet and workout programming and how hard you work in the gym. Now, there are a number of ways to progress in your Weightlifting.

But many of the most practical and effective ones share something in common. They all involve prescribed levels of difficulty in individual sets. In other words, some of your sets are supposed to be moderately challenging, while others are supposed to involve near maximum effort. For example, one of my favorite progression models is known as double progression, and it’s what I recommend and have worked into my programs for men and women, bigger leaner stronger and thinner leaner stronger.

And here’s how it works. So with double progression, you work with a given weight in a given rep range, and once you hit the top of that rep range for one, two, or three sets, depending on the programming, you move up in weight. And then you work with that new heavier weight until you hit the top of your rep range again for the required number of sets, move up in weight, and so on.

In this way, you are first progressing in your reps with a given weight, and then you are progressing with the amount of weight that you’re lifting, hence double progression. Here’s a key question. question though, how difficult are those sets supposed to be? If you want to get the most out of double progression, then you want to end your working your heavy, your hard sets, one or two reps shy of technical failure, which is the point where you can no longer continue with proper form, where your form starts.

breaking down. So in other words, you want your working sets, your hard sets to be pretty damn hard. And this way of looking at the difficulty of the exercise in this case weightlifting brings us to the topic at hand, which is the RPE scale. Now, as you will soon learn the RPE scale is a very simple but powerful tool for workout programming and especially for strength training.

Because it can help you gain muscle and strength faster while also reducing the risk of injury and overtraining. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in, so instead I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine.

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The simple science of building the ultimate male body. Then you want to read Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play. Now I should also mention that you can get the audio book 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend you do if you are not currently listening to audiobooks.

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All right. So let’s start with the first question probably on your mind. What is RPE? As I mentioned earlier, it stands for rating of perceived exertion, and there are different ways to express RPE, but they all provide the same thing. They provide a numerical measurement of how hard exercise. Now, this concept was developed by a Swedish researcher named Gunnar Borg, amazing name actually, who introduced it in several studies published in the 1950s.

Now, Borg found that our subjective ratings of effort during exercise are often a reliable and in some cases a superior way to measure intensity than hard numbers like running speed, weight on the bar speed, or bar path, and so on. Borg then created a table to help represent these subjective ratings called the Borg RPE scale, which looks like this.

Rating six is no exertion. Rating seven is extremely light exertion. Eight is in the middle between seven and nine, nine being very light exertion. 10 is no specific. It’s just the stepping stone to 11, which is light exertion. 12 then leads into 13, somewhat hard exertion. 14 leads to 15, which is hard. 16 leads to 17, which is very hard.

18 leads to 19, which is extremely hard and 20 represents maximal exertion. Now, this scale goes from six to 20, because if you multiply those numbers by 10, you get a rough estimate of what your heart rate will be like at each level of intensity, which is a reliable indicator of cardiovascular exertion.

At least. For example, if your run feels to you like a 10 RPE on that scale, right? Something in between very light and light, it’s likely that your heart rate is going to be at about 100 beats per minute. Now that brings us to one of the drawbacks of this original Borg RPE scale. It is designed for Cardio workouts, not strength workouts, where the heart rate is no longer closely correlated with the amount of physical effort.

There are other downsides to this chart as well. One, the numerical range is confusing for most people because it’s too large. How do you determine if you’re at a nine or a 10 or a 13 or a 15? If you’re like most people. You can’t without a significant amount of practice, which of course makes it a lot less practical.

Another downside is studies show that heart rates can actually vary quite a bit from person to person at the same workout intensity. And research also shows that people can have very different heart rates at the same workout intensity, which leads to mis estimations of RPE. Now, all that is why researchers eventually developed a more universally practical RPE scale known as the CR10 RPE scale, which can be used for easily estimating the intensity of all kinds of exercise.

The CR by the way, stands for category ratio scaling, which refers to a bunch of scientific calculations that we just don’t need to get into. Now, there are a few variations of this RPE scale that are floating around. But they’re all more or less the same. They generally go like this. Zero is no exertion at all.

1. 5 is extremely weak, just noticeable level of exertion. One, very weak. Two, weak, light. Three, moderate. Four, somewhat strong. Five, strong, heavy. Six leads to seven, very strong. Eight, nine lead to ten, which is extremely strong, almost max. And then anything above ten is maximal effort. Now, this new RPE scale is nice because it is simpler to use.

It’s easier to understand and it isn’t based on heart rate, which means that it’s more useful for those of us who are into strength training. So for example, a zero on the CR 10 scale would be something like moving your arms in a bench press motion, which takes basically no effort and a 10 would be grinding out a new one rep max on your bench press.

All right. So why do people use RPE scales? The main reason why people use these things is to control their workout intensity. Now, in the context of weightlifting, what this means is controlling how much weight you put on the bar relative to your one rep max, which is a major component of progression.

As I. mentioned earlier. Now, as a natural weightlifter, here’s a Maxim that you can take to the bank. If you want to keep gaining muscle, then you need to keep gaining strength. And the best way to do that is to keep adding weight to the bar over time. This process is relatively simple when you first start lifting weights because every week it’s like you can just keep adding five or even 10 pounds to the bar on your big compound lifts and you just keep getting bigger and stronger.

This only lasts so long though. Once your newbie gains are exhausted, things slow down. And if you don’t have a good and workable plan for moving ahead, you will wind up stuck in a rut. I’ve been there myself and it took smart dieting and smart workout programming to get the needle moving again. Now, a major part of that smart dieting.

Workout programming was incorporating RPE into my strength workouts because it gives you a simple, reliable, and scientific way to decide how hard you’re going to push yourself to progress. In other words, RPE helps you strategically Add or subtract intensity and volume or weight and reps based on how you’re feeling on a day to day basis, while also ensuring that your muscle and strength gains are trending upward over time.

Now, if you’ve spent any amount of time lifting heavy weights, you know that individual workouts can feel significantly easier or harder depending on a whole slew of factors, including How many carbs you ate in your pre workout meal, how much quality sleep you have been getting, how many calories you have been generally eating, how much protein you’ve been generally eating, how much training volume you’ve been doing recently, how much life stress you’re dealing with and so on.

And for most of us, most of those things remain fairly stable in our lives, even if undesirably which is why Many weightlifting programs have you add weight on a fixed schedule based on a percentage of your one rep max, or just an arbitrary amount like five or 10 pounds. This type of linear progression as it’s called is the basis for many of the best strength training programs out there.

You’ll find some version of it in beginner programs like starting strength, intermediate programs like Wendler 531, and even advanced programs like Shaco. Now, this approach is obviously workable and solid, but there is one problem with it. Actual progress is never perfectly linear really in anything in life, let alone weightlifting due to the factors that I mentioned earlier and others.

Some days, you’d be able to add more weight to the bar than the plan calls for, but on other days, you may not be able to add any weight at all, or you may even have to reduce the weight on the bar. For example, if all of your sets feel like a seven on the scale of one to 10, but your training plan says you should add five pounds, why should you hold back when you could probably add 10 or even 15 pounds?

On the other hand, if All of your sets are feeling like nines or tens on the same scale. Should you trust the program and keep adding weight knowing that you’re already pushing yourself to your limits? RPE helps you make smart decisions in situations like those because it gives you another criterion that you can use to determine what you should do to ensure safe long term progress.

By adjusting your training based on RPE, you get the maximum muscle building stimulus out of every workout without pushing yourself so hard that you increase the risk of getting injured or running into symptoms related to overtraining. Now, how do you do that though? We recall that the Original RPE scale was developed for endurance athletes and doesn’t work as well for weightlifting.

And that’s probably why you’re here listening to this podcast. And then later came the updated CR10 scale, which is much better for our purposes than the original scale, but it’s still not ideal for strength training because studies show that people have trouble connecting their subjective ratings with objective.

Levels of exertion. So for instance, many people will rate a set as a nine RPE, but stop several reps shy of technical failure based on actual one rep max calculations. To understand why we need to take another look at how the original RPE scale was developed. Now, typically. When RPE is used for endurance training, it’s also tied to another objective number like wattage and cycling or heart rate in running or pace in swimming.

And this is known as anchoring. So for example, if your current maximum heart rate is 200 beats per minute while running, you can anchor that as your 10 RPE and then work backwards from that to figure out what a nine, eight and seven should feel like. Now, in this case, you could say that a seven is 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, which would be about 140 beats per minute.

Then during your workouts, you could use a heart rate monitor to get an accurate idea, a subjective understanding of what a seven RPE truly feels like. Now if you train long enough, of course you are going to have good and bad days where your heart rate is a bit lower or higher than your RPE would indicate.

But research shows that method that I just outlined is. Generally reliable. Now, what about us weightlifters though? What are we supposed to do? Let’s start with a little exercise at the end of a hard set. Just before you re rack your weights, ask yourself, if I absolutely had to, how many more reps could I have gotten with good form?

Your answer is known as your reps in reserve RIR or how many reps you could have done, but didn’t. And if you’re like most people, this is how you naturally talk about your weightlifting sets. After a hard set of squats, for example, you might say, God, that was a grinder. I had maybe one rep left in the tank.

So in other words, reps in reserve is how we naturally express how a hard set feels Which is why studies show that it is a very accurate way to track the same variable as RPE, which is intensity. In fact, RAR and RPE are so interchangeable that they correlate nicely with each other like this. So an RPE of 10 means absolute maximum effort, zero reps remaining.

An RPE of nine means one rep remaining. An RPE of eight. Two reps remaining. Seven, three reps remaining. Five to six, four to six reps remaining. Three to four, very light effort. One to two, little to no effort. So as you can see, a 10 RPE is a zero RAR and a nine RPE is a one RAR and so forth. Meaning that when you say a set was a seven RPE, you’re saying that you had three reps left in the tank and vice versa.

This raises a question though. How can you know how many reps you still have in reserve? Do you have to actually test it periodically? Do you have to take sets to absolute failure now and then? Scientists at the university of Sydney wanted to find an answer to this question. So they conducted a study on 17 male bodybuilders back in 2012.

Now the researchers had the subjects do five sets of the squat and bench press. And after the 10th rep of each set, everyone called out their estimated RPE and RAR, and then continued to do as many reps as they could until they reach failure. What the scientists found is while the subjects RAR predictions weren’t perfect, everyone was able to predict how many reps they had left To within about one rep.

That is, if they predicted they could get five more reps, they would usually get four to six more reps when actually going for it. The researchers also found that if the lifters used just the traditional RPE scale of one to 10, their predictions weren’t as accurate as when they used RIR. Several other studies have echoed these findings as well.

RAR is a simple and more accurate and reliable way for us weightlifters to estimate how hard we’re working than RPE scales. That said, nothing is perfect of course, and there are a few things to keep in mind when you are using RAR in your training. The first one is if you have less than a year of lifting under your belt, your RAR predictions will So probably be spotty.

Many people need a few years of heavy weightlifting to get good at estimating their RAR. You can probably shorten this runway to proficiency to six to 12 months if you are particularly attentive to your RAR or track and test it frequently, but you can expect inaccuracy for the first year or so regardless.

This is why many good strength training programs. Do just prescribe regular increases in weight on the bar, regardless of RPE or RAR. Another important caveat is the further you are from failure on each set, the less accurate RAR becomes. So for example, let’s say that you can squat 250 pounds for five reps and you have two 200 pounds on the bar at the fifth rep with 200 pounds.

You might estimate that you could do five more reps before reaching technical failure. One rep max calculations would say otherwise though, they would say that you could probably get eight or even 10 more reps. Now, the reason for this discrepancy is simple. Studies show that most people under predict how many reps they can still perform as the rep range gets larger.

This is why research shows that RAR is more effective when you’re using relatively heavy weights that are about 80 percent of your one rep max or higher, or the six to eight rep range or lower. And when you’re taking each set to the point of one to three reps shy of failure. Now, the third point that you should keep in mind here is if you are a beast mode type of person, it’s easy to tell yourself that a set felt easier than it really was so you can progress faster.

And I get it. I’ve done that guilty as charged. Unfortunately, it is. Self defeating though. For instance, if you squatted 315 pounds for 5 reps and that left you completely gassed, you might want to tell yourself that you racked it at a cool RIR of 3. And then think that, maybe you can bump up to three 20 or three 25 in your next workout and get a solid set of four.

You probably won’t be able to though, because your true RAR was one. What’ll probably happen is you’re going to miss your reps with three 20 or three 25. And then you’re gonna have to go back to three 15 in your next workout and keep working at it. All right. So those are the five. fundamentals of RPE and weightlifting.

Let’s talk now about how to use that to get bigger and stronger faster. And first, let’s just quickly review the key points of what we’ve covered so far. One is the reason to use RPE or RAR is to control your workout intensity. You want to use weights that are heavy enough to keep making strength and muscle gains, but not so heavy that you damn near shit yourself at the end of most of your hard sets.

Standard RPE scales work well for endurance exercise, but they do not work well for strength training. And for strength training, it’s much better to estimate your RPE based on your reps in reserve than using a standard RPE scale. Now there are many different ways that you can use this information that I’ve told you Modify your workout programming and you can find all kinds of RPE based strength training programs that use it to determine how many sets and reps you’re supposed to do in each workout and how long you’re supposed to rest in between sets and so forth.

Fortunately, though, you don’t need all the complexity to get the majority of the benefits that RPE based training has to offer. So here’s what I personally use and recommend. And what has also been proven to work in scientific research as well as popular weightlifting programs like my programs for men and women that I mentioned earlier, BiggerLeanerStronger and ThinnerLeanerStronger.

So first, you want to decide on the rep range that you want to use. Second, you want to decide on your RPE range and translate that to an RAR. Third, you want to determine your starting weights. And fourth, you want to increase the weights as fast as you can while staying within your rep range and your RPE limits.

So let’s break this down step by step. First is decide on the rep range you want to use. Now you can use RPE based training for any rep range, of course, but I do generally recommend the 4 to 6 rep range for your big compound exercises and the 4 to 6 to 8 to 10 rep ranges for most of your isolation exercises.

Second, you want to decide on your RPE range and you want to translate that into RAR. Now based on research from scientists like Dr. Eric Helms, who is a member of my scientific advisory board over at Legion Athletics, a safe and effective RPE range for gaining muscle and strength is seven to nine. So that means an RER of three to one reps.

In other words, that means you end most of your hard sets one to three reps shy of failure. Studies show that this is a sweet spot of sorts for maintaining proper intensity in your workouts without going to failure too often, which limits how many total reps and sets you can do in your workouts and in some cases can even increase the risk of injury.

Step number three is determine your starting weights. Now, the easiest way to do this is to use a calculator to determine your current rep maxes on exercises that you’ll be doing. And you can find a calculator over at legionathletics. com slash repmax. RPE hyphen scale, or if you just go to legionathletics.

com and search for RPE, you will find an article that I wrote on this subject that I am reading to you right now. And there is a calculator in it. And in this calculator, you’ll see that for example, if you can bench 225 pounds for five reps, you can enter those numbers in the calculator. And here’s what you will see.

You’ll see, for example, that you should be able to get about 253 pounds for one rep, 240 pounds for two reps, 228 pounds for three reps and so forth. There are several. formulas in this calculator for estimating your rep maxes, but I just go with the brisky results myself. Now you have to remember the numbers that this calculator spits out, assume that you are going to absolute failure in your sets, which I do not recommend that you do every workout.

Therefore, if you want to work in, let’s say the four to six rep range, you wouldn’t want to load the bar with about 220 pounds, because that would most likely produce an RPE of 10 and an RIR of zero. So instead you need to lower the weight a little bit to bring that RPE down and to bring the RPE up to the Seven to nine and one to three ranges respectively.

Remember that’s the Goldilocks zone for muscle and strength gain. So to do that, all you have to do is add three reps to the lower and upper limits of your given rep range and use a weight in that range. So in this instance, if you want to work in the four to six rep range. You would start with a weight that is in the range of your seven to nine rep max as calculated by the calculator.

Now, in this case, according to the brisky results, that works out to 192 to 202 pounds. And if it were me, I would probably start in the middle with 195 pounds and see how it goes. goes. Now, step number four is increasing the weights as fast as you can while still staying within your rep range and RPE limits.

Now, here’s where we come back to the elegant double progression model that I mentioned earlier in this podcast. There are only two moving parts to the system as I like to work it. One, when you hit the top of your rep range for one set and are within your range, you move up in weight. Two, if you can at least hit the bottom of your rep range or come to within one rep of it in your first set with the new heavier weight, you then work with that new heavier weight until you can hit the top of your rep range for one set with it.

And if you can’t get to at least the bottom of your rep range or at least within one rep of it, you then go back to the lighter weight and you work with it until you can perform it. Two sets at the top of your rep range, at which point your progression should be able to stick. Now, if you’re going to follow all of my advice here on the rep ranges and RAR, here’s how this might look.

So let’s say you’re deadlifting in the four to six rep range on your first set of your workout and you get Six reps of three 35 with a couple reps left in the tank. So that means it’s time to progress. You then add 10 pounds to the bar. You rest a few minutes and you get four reps or even three reps.

Great, perfect. Your progression sticks and you now work with 345 pounds until you can pull it for six reps with at least one RAR and then you move up in weight and so forth. If however, You put three 45 in the bar, you rest, you only get two reps or one rep. You then want to drop the weight back to three 35 and work with it until you can pull it for two sets of six reps with an RIR of one to three, at which point you move back.

Up to three 45. And although it’s unlikely, if you can’t get at least three or four reps on this second time around, you then have two options. You can decrease the weight to 340 pounds and see how that goes. Or you can go back to three 35 and work with that until you can perform three. sets of six reps with it within that one to three RAR.

And I personally prefer the former option. I personally prefer to add weight to the bar. So here’s the bottom line on RPE. RPE scales are used to produce a numerical estimate of how hard exercise feels. The original Borg RPE scales were designed for endurance athletes and they aren’t as accurate or useful for us weightlifters.

A better kind of RPE scale for us lifters is RIR, which represents how many more reps you could have done at the end of a set before reaching technical failure, which is the point at which your form breaks down. You can no longer perform a proper rep by incorporating RIR into your programming and your progression scheme.

In particular, you can maintain the RIR Optimal level of intensity in your workouts, specifically by setting limits on how close you take each set to failure. You can lift heavy enough to stimulate muscle and strength gains without trying to force your body to do things that can lead to injury, plateaus or symptoms related to over training.

Now, if you’re new to all of this, if you’re new to RPE and RAR, it might feel awkward at first, but don’t worry, you will pick it up fairly quickly and you will also see the benefits quickly. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

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