-: So when we look at the rep max/RPE relationship,
and we see these things change throughout our program,
there's gonna be,
essentially you can look at these as like signs
that you're either working in the right direction,
the wrong direction, etc.
So, let's go through some examples.
Let's go through kind of what the base principles are,
this is that.
Okay, rep max and RPE, they're both measuring
or trying to qualify effort and intensity.
Ideally, their trend should correlate.
If everything is working correctly, we should see that like,
well, okay, if my rep max,
if I do a set that should be a higher rep max
should also be a higher RPE.
So basically two scenarios that we're looking for
when things are going right.
They should either both move in the same direction,
meaning we should be progressing in both.
So it's possible
that maybe you were going for a six RPE last week
and then this week, you're gonna go for a seven,
we should see that the rep max goes up
and the RPE both go up.
Because if your RPE goes up and your rep max stays the same,
if it's harder to do less and on the tangible number,
that's not gonna be a good sign.
So that or we wanna see the rep max go up at the same RPE,
meaning that if my goal is to still be at an eight RPE,
if I'm progressing,
I should see the rep max calculation go up.
So those are the two scenarios, they're either both going up
or the rep max is going up and the RPE is staying the same.
Like that means we are likely progressing
in the direction that we want to
in terms of getting adaptations and recovering
and all of the good things that are gonna lead
to the gains of performance improvements.
When they don't trend similarly,
this can help us assess
and adjust programming, progressions,
and start making some decisions in terms of deviation
from our current plan or at least refining that plan.
So
if rep max goes down, but RPE goes up,
rep max goes down for the same RPE,
or rep max stays the same, but RPE goes up,
all of those mean that the perceived effort is going up
in relationship to our actual performance.
Okay, so if it seems harder to perform the same or less,
or it seems just as hard to perform less,
that is a sign that we did not make a progression
in performance likely,
or that with all of the factors in terms of fatigue
and maybe neurological fatigue, systemic fatigue,
all of these things that are coming on top of us,
for some reason or another, we are either performing worse,
we are perceiving things as more difficult,
or a combination of both.
All being a sign that whatever we're doing likely isn't
either working as fast as we would like it to
or we are in some way under-recovering.
So that's where the real beauty
of looking at these two numbers is, is looking at the why.
Are we under-recovered?
Are we not adapting?
Or are rest intervals too short?
Because that actually can happen like,
one, if it's a new program or whatever
and you're comparing it to a different program,
rest intervals could be there.
Like are we now super-setting another exercise in between?
That's affecting it.
Did we change the order?
Are we training at a different time of day?
All sorts of things.
With rest intervals,
as a person is progressing over a long meso,
like say you have a beginner
or somebody that's took time off training
and then they come back in,
depending on what they've been doing,
they might have come in
with really good capacity adaptations, very poor strength
and all sudden they get all their strength back
and they move to a bunch of heavy loads,
you progress really fast,
and you don't adjust the rest intervals
to compensate for the massive amount of tonnage increase
in work they're doing
'cause they're working at heavier loads,
all of a sudden it's like okay,
that might be it that right there
'cause like we're starting to see this.
So when we look for instance at rest intervals,
where the issue you would see that it accumulated
over the course of the sets.
So the first set they're like,
oh yeah, things are doing good.
But then the second, the third set,
you'll be like,
okay, but now it looks like we haven't progressed
but we progressed in the first set.
So there's a lot of things that we can look at with this
and then you line that up
with the biofeedback that you're looking at
and the different performance metrics
that you're looking at.
And you try and figure out, well what's going on?
Why aren't we progressing in the way
that we expected to progress?
And then what is the solution to that?
Is it to up nutrition?
Is it to decrease frequency, decrease volume,
take a deload, etc?
That's a macro decision
where you gotta look at all those things together.
But you at least know in this scenario,
that a change needs to be made.
And if you weren't tracking all these,
like we look at those previous scenarios,
there are definitely times
when you could probably be doing a little bit more tonnage,
but and your RPEs are about the same or whatever.
It wouldn't be a very significant progression.
So having that rep max in there
is a really good way of looking at and saying okay,
how much of a progression in stimulus
did I really make here?
So if we look at the other scenario,
if rep max goes up and RPE goes down,
or rep max stays the same, but RPE goes down,
that means our perceived effort is going down
in relationship to,
not necessarily our performance capabilities,
but the way we happen to be performing that day,
meaning that for what we're doing,
it seems easier than maybe it should be.
And so in this case scenario,
the question to ask the wise are,
are we not progressing fast enough?
Maybe it is what you're looking for.
Maybe this is what you want,
because you are looking at a situation
where maybe you have room to add sets
because that was the thing that you were looking for.
So in this scenario, 'cause remember, the ideal scenario
is that either they're both going up,
or our rep max is going up for the same relative RPE.
And that's gonna be depending
on what your goal progression is.
Because say you started your mesocycle at a lower RPE
and you were hoping to progress that RPE
over the course of the mesocycle,
you would expect to see both of them going up.
But say you're at a point where you're trying to maintain
because you're already maybe at a high RPE or,
you're so high that it's gonna change slower or whatever,
you would expect that then that RPE
is gonna be kind of stagnant
or move slower than the rep max does,
because you should still be progressing
and then performance in some way, shape or form.
And when we look at,
like what's our best proxy for estimating
that we're getting hypertrophy?
Being able to do like,
the things that we're looking at for volume of stimulus,
being able to do more work at these given intensities
and whatnot like in some way shape or form,
like that is relative to stimulus,
is probably one of the best proxies for like,
are we growing muscle?
Is are we able to do the things
that move that volume of stimulus up?
'Cause if we're able to perform in that way,
not just perform extra work volume,
but actually perform more stimulus volume,
that's probably one of the best things
that we could do to guesstimate,
like are we actually in a position where we are,
(indistinct) one is,
we're estimating that we're producing the stimulus.
But two, if we're able to do more of the work
that kind of is correlated with that stimulus,
versus just more work period or whatever,
that's probably a good sign
that you're going to be like getting measurable hypertrophy
over the long run.
To finish this rep max to RPE relationship,
I wanted to just kinda go through some examples
so we have our baseline 10 of 100 pounds
at 133 rep max estimated, we'll say that was an RPE.
That's our baseline that we're working from.
And I just wanna walk through some of the examples
from the previous unit.
So if we go up in reps, then rep max goes up,
and RPE maybe stays the same, that's normal.
'Cause that situation where rep max is going up,
RPE stays the same, that would be relatively normal.
Say we stayed at 10, we went up to 105 pounds,
small increment, our rep max is similar within a few pounds,
RPE stays the same,
that would be a good progression, right?
'Cause that's what we wanna see.
If we make a small improvement in performance,
we're able to do that improvement in performance
at the same or maybe even less perceived effort
if we're not progressing enough.
And then if we were to combine both of those,
it would just be a bigger progression.
So maybe in that case then
because we're progressing a greater amount,
we're doing almost twice the progression,
that the RPE goes up.
But because both of them are going up
and it was a bigger jump, we would still say like,
okay, that's a normal progression.
And then just another example here
using the higher weight jump
instead of a weight and rep jump.
Again, bigger progression,
we'll likely see the RPE go up as well.
So basically the,
if we're progressing
the demand, like in terms of the reps
or the weight or combination of,
right in line with the way that we're adapting
from a performance perspective,
we would expect the RPE to stay relatively neutral.
If we're progressing a little faster than the adaptation,
we will expect the RPE to climb.
If we're adapting a little slower, we may actually...
Or if we're progressing a little slower,
we may see the RPE drop.
It's like all of those scenarios are, we'll say normal good,
but just to understand that like,
what's your goal?
Are you trying to move up your average RPE?
Or are you trying to move up the RPE of this given set?
Then the relationship between those
can tell you whether or not you're hitting that target
in relationship to your current rates
of adaptation and performance.
So, if we look at the next row down here,
if we see that we do the same,
or we'll say like,
we do a small progression but the RPE climbs,
that means it's probably poor recovery, poor adaptation.
If we stay the same, no progression and it climbs,
that's definitely poor recovery, poor adaptation.
So doesn't tell us necessarily why it was poor recovery.
Could have been a bad night's sleep,
could have been not enough food,
could be that we're using too much volume,
could be it's time for a deload,
could be so many other factors in there.
That's a macro-level question that you're gonna have to ask,
so that you can come up with an answer.
But when the RPE climbs, and the rep max doesn't,
or the RPE climbs faster
than what we would like that rep max calculation to,
that's a sign that we are not recovering.
And if that is happening, even if you survive the workout,
that's a sign that you're about to run into a wall,
especially if you're creeping up like okay,
we barely made a small progression
and we jumped from an RPE eight to an RPE nine,
if nothing changes,
and we do the same thing next week when we get to a 10.
We were eventually gonna get to the point
where now we're likely gonna regress,
we're gonna need to deload or whatever.
If that's the end target that you're going for,
because of the way you're like programmed or whatever,
then that maybe that's a valuable tool.
It's just important to kinda have that number in there
so that you kinda have an estimate of what's happening.
And then in my yellow section here,
what we're looking at is, if those RPEs start to drop,
so if we're progressing, that means okay,
the adaptation is in excess, the progression.
So those are the examples that I gave just a minute ago,
like okay, we're now at a ratio where,
we're adapting in terms of performance,
faster than
the way that we're progressing the work demand.
So in that case, there's probably an opportunity
to progress faster if you want.
Or, who knows, maybe you gave somebody a re-feed,
they're just had a really low stress week or whatever,
and you decide like,
okay, cool, we're just gonna take that as like,
yeah, this wasn't as hard
but we're gonna maintain those progressions
because there was an anomaly or whatever,
we're gonna play conservative, whatever it may be.
But it's important to understand kind of
where you sit on that scale.
And then, of course,
our normal adaptations that we would be expecting to see.
We would be expecting to see either both of these go up,
or one to go up and the other stays the same, etc.
That's kind of
our ideal situation.
So in this case, if the rep max is climbing fast,
but the RPE is staying there, that's a positive thing,
but it means that we're adapting fast.
That may just be a sign of like,
okay, this person's a fast adapter right now,
we can push these progression things.
If all of a sudden I start to see that situation shift
to where the rep max climb goes down,
and the RPE starts to go up,
in terms of the relative change over weeks,
then I could say,
okay, maybe now we're getting to that point
where we're not adapting as fast.
So when you start a new exercise,
you're likely gonna be in this situation.
Like you're gonna be in the situation
where your performance is gonna go up really fast
and your RPE is gonna stay relatively the same
or maybe even go down
if you don't progress enough or whatever.
So just know that we're in this period right now
where we're adapting pretty darn fast.
And that could be,
that could be completely fine.
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