The Magic of Analog, Part Two: Session RPE

If you came to this last Saturday’s Endurance Spin, you know that at the moment we're pretty stoked on Rate of Perceived Exertion, or RPE. This is actually something we've been into for a while, but we're starting to play more and more with it, and we think it's a cool step in continuing to help develop your mastery around training and racing. No, we're never going to completely ditch the devices, since they have a real place in learning what certain efforts "mean" to your body, but learning how to deploy RPE will make you (we believe) a more confident and more competent athlete.

Recently we made it mandatory to leave us an RPE rating and a “subjective feeling” rating when logging workout on TrainingPeaks. Not sure what that even means? When you finish a workout and leave the information for your coach, you have a chance to leave both of those pieces of information on a screen that looks like this:

You have five options of smiley (or, we guess, three options of smiley faces, one frowny face and one…dead face?) faces for how you felt, and then a 1-10 for what the whole workout felt like in terms of exertion. We’re proud that our athletes REALLY responded to this request, with almost 80% of workouts logged in the first week coming with a RPE rating. We’re going to admit that the request was a bit two-faced. Yes, we really believe that ranking your effort after a workout is a great way to internalize the workout and reflect upon it, but we were also doing some data mining. We’ve started using something called “Session RPE” in working with our athletes, which has actually been around for ages—it has just fallen out of style with the rise in training devices. Many of you will be familiar with CTL, ATL, and TSB from TrainingPeaks, even if you’re not sure what they even mean. If you are familiar, you know they should be taken with a grain of salt. And if you're using your watch in the pool, then they have to be taken with a salt mine. FTP not set correctly? All those numbers will be off. Threshold pace not right? Off again. The Performance Manager Chart in TrainingPeaks is a clever tool, but there is so much possible error in it that many times I only refer to it as a passing curiosity.

Enter Session RPE (sRPE). It's simple. You give a workout a rating from 1-10. The software multiples that number by the minutes of the workout. Done. Do a 60-minute run that feels moderate, or 5 out 10? 300 sRPE points. After a few weeks of training, you get a chart in WKO5 that looks like this:

The Session RPE chart in WKO5

Ignore the "monotony" and "strain" columns for now. You can see that in the last week of this year's training for this athlete, he put in about ten hours of training (595 minutes) and total sRPE was around 2800. Then he took about two weeks off—you can see by the big drop in sRPE over the next two weeks. And now, over the last two weeks, things have been building again: a 2835-point week, and then this as-yet-unfinished week and about 3125 points. Want this in visual? Here you go:

The Session RPE Performance Manager Chart

Astute users of the TrainingPeaks PMC will notice the same colors and terms! CTL, ATL, and TSB. We've gone into this elsewhere, but CTL basically stands in for the accumulated work over a long period of time (CHRONIC Training Load), ATL over a short period of time (ACUTE Training Load), and TSB (Training Stress Balance) is the difference between the two. You can see that, as this athlete has picked training back up, the pink line (ATL) is rising quickly, while the blue line (CTL) is rising at a lower rate. The yellow bars (TSB) fall below the 0 line as the athlete’s freshness drops due to training again. Duh, you're thinking. Your fitness is going back up after a break. Big whoop. You're right. Not revolutionary. But here's the thing that is: sRPE takes into account your whole existence as an athlete, which is why we're so excited about it at CBCG. When you upload a workout to TrainingPeaks and it generates a Training Stress Score (TSS) from your power meter, neither your power meter nor Training Peaks knows what was going on for you that day physically, emotionally, or intellectually. Those three states have a HUGE impact on the perceived exertion of a workout, and what feels like a 2 today could feel like a 6 next week, depending on fatigue, stress, diet, mood, sleep, cycle, and the thousands of other factors that make you, well, you.

Finally, sRPE allows us to check an athlete's workload for appropriate loading rates and adjust accordingly. There is robust evidence that an ATL that's more than 1.3x the athlete's current CTL puts him or her at increased risk for injury, and below 0.8 is a sign of undertraining. Of course individual athletes will expose differences, but the evidence is pretty strong: 89% of injuries occurred less than ten days after a spike in "strain," which is the standard deviation of the weekly training load multiplied by the weekly training load. If that last sentence made your head spin, here's the takeaway: increase training load by more than 15% from week to week and you are headed for an injury. sRPE also allows us to paint a true picture of an individual athlete's build towards a race. Having set aside the somewhat arbitrary metrics that training devices give us, we can look back at an athlete's build for clues to the concluding performance, and we know that the data reflects the athlete, rather than a predictive model.

Want to give SessionRPE a whirl? You can drop us a line, or schedule a free coaching consultation with us here.