-: So, we just finished up looking at rep max calculations
and how that can kind of show us a tangible difference
between intensity of effort and maybe stimulus volume
versus the like, just the total tonnage volume.
And so to move that forward,
we're gonna look at the subjective effort measures
of RPE and RIR, and looking at them
in terms of set volume measure.
And then we can kind of bring these together
and look at the pros and cons of each,
how they can be used together, separate, or whatnot.
So, another way that people sometimes classify volume
is just the number of hard sets.
And when we look at that, on its own,
it's likely a better indicator of the stimulus
than just tonnage,
because it at least is telling us
probably a closer indicator
of how many effective reps are we getting.
The limit is it's harder to qualify
because RPE and RIR are subjective measures, meaning,
it's depending on our ability
to accurately say that was an eight
and it was really an eight
when we don't have a tangible measure.
So, it's not as clean as say using rep max calculations,
but one it can be very convenient.
And there's gonna be a lot of push and pull
when you decide which one of these things
or what combination of them you want to end up using.
But ultimately, I think RPE and RIR can be very valuable,
especially if you maintain that context
that they are subjective measures,
and you understand how to manipulate
your assessment of those measures
based on that subjective quality.
The other thing is that it's harder to quantify
because RPE and RIR are not perfectly consistent
across multiple rep ranges,
exercises, different individuals.
So, that subjective portion carries over
into the quantification.
'Cause if we can't qualify the number properly,
that means that it makes it harder
to then quantify that
because we haven't qualified it as well.
So as we move through this, just keep that in mind,
that when you look at RPE,
you might look at one person's eight
as different than another person's eight
when you're making training decisions.
You might look at an eight on a squat
different than an eight on a bicep curl.
You might look at an eight on a set of 20
different than an eight on a set of four, et cetera.
And hopefully you kind of saw
some of the principles behind that
when we went through the RPE/RIR,
and we look at like the stimulating reps
and tonnage and the different things that are going on.
'Cause for instance if I do a high rep set,
that may be more exhausting
simply because of the amount of energy I'm expending,
but it may not necessarily be a lot more stimulus.
And so depending on how much fatigue
that muscle's getting if I rest longer,
if I have plenty of carbohydrates in my diet, et cetera,
it's like my tolerance to like say metabolic fatigue
may be a lot higher, even though the perceived effort
of those sets may be harder
if I correlate RPE more to like,
"Well geez, like I was really out of breath.
"It burned a lot, et cetera."
Versus carrying a huge weight on my back where it's like,
"Okay, felt like it was gonna crush me,
"but it didn't burn or whatever."
Like there's a lot of different degrees of difficulty.
So, qualifying RPE.
And we'll get into a section on how to individualize this,
but before we get into these numbers,
I just want you to have that context going in.
So, what I wanna start with here
is maybe an over, I don't know if we call it oversimplified,
but definitely a simplified view
of looking at how we could use RPE/RIR as a volume measure.
And what I'm gonna do for the sake of demonstration
is I'm usually just gonna use RPE in these examples.
You can take RIR, put it in there,
but from the math and the illustration of it,
RIR is much harder to illustrate in the sheet
and stuff like that.
So, just keep that also in mind if you're going to use it.
So if I use an example for RPE, it works for RIR.
You just have to do that conversion.
Which remember if you look back,
isn't unnecessarily the same across different rep ranges.
But what we can do to figure out like, well,
how much volume is a set of an RPE seven
compared to an RPE nine, et cetera,
is what we can do is we can take essentially
the number of what we would call stimulating sets,
average the RPE across those sets
to get a relative idea of like how much volume that was.
So in the examples here,
I've got this set up over here on the left
where we're doing six sets,
but maybe the first two of those aren't quite stimulating.
They're feeder sets,
they're maybe an extended part of the warmup,
whatever they would have happened to been.
But they're not quite hitting
that like stimulating threshold.
So, what I would do is I would take the average
of what I considered these stimulating sets.
And so if we look at an RPE climbing method here.
If you did eights across the board or sevens,
however you happen to program, doesn't matter,
we're taking the average of that.
Me typically, I'm gonna program
more often with a climbing RPE.
That's just one of the things
that I find to work very well.
So, I have a total of four sets.
That averages out to a 7.5.
Okay, just ignore this green number down here.
We'll get to that in a second.
Second example here in the middle.
Okay, we got four sets.
You jumped right in at what we would call
an effective reps level.
Like it was already at an RPE of seven.
We got four sets at climb.
So, now the average across those four is 8.5.
So, this is more volume than this likely.
'Cause the average is 8.5 across the same amount of sets.
So, that's really easy to qualify.
Because it's like, well, it's the same amount of sets.
Whichever one had the highest average RPE was more.
Unfortunately, we don't always have the same amount of sets.
Sometimes we increase sets.
Sometimes we're comparing across programs
that are using drastically different sets, et cetera.
So, we need to be able to have a way to figure out,
"Well, what the hell
"do I do with this example on the right?"
Where it's only three sets.
In this case, I put it at a higher RPE
so that I could actually make it more volume
than the first example here.
Because if I just made one that was less,
that would be like, "Well duh, there's less sets,
"there's less volume."
But that's not always gonna be the case,
because you could have lower sets and high intensity.
You could have higher sets and lower intensity.
And how do you compare those things?
And so what I've done
is I basically used like,
we can call this whatever you want.
It's like an effective reps factor.
I just put in ERF.
If you want to call it effective reps factor, whatever.
I'm not a huge fan of trying to create
a bunch of acronyms for this. I have a feeling at the end
we're gonna qualify some of these terms.
But essentially what this is
is it's a factor, a mathematical algorithm
of these two numbers here.
Essentially, and this is what it is,
is it's the square root of our average
multiplied by the number of sets divided by
a number, I believe it's 20,
to get you to what is a reasonable number
of how many effective reps are there likely in this.
I don't know if it's quite perfect yet
in terms of the formula perspective.
It seems to work out really well
in a lot of the examples we'd go,
in terms of what we would intuitively look at
is how many effective reps are in there.
But the most important thing
is it allows us to compare these things to each other.
So in this case over here,
when we only have the three sets,
but the RPE is very high.
If we were to say, start counting.
Let's say that these were sets of 10 or something like that,
and we are gonna be counting those reps
from the RPE six mark or something like that.
This would work out pretty well to like
all right, this is gonna be probably between
12 and 13-ish effective reps.
'Cause if we say, "Okay, it's from six."
So, here we have six, seven, eight, on set one.
So, there's three effective reps.
And then we would have four effective reps
from the next one.
So, that takes us to seven.
And then we would have
five effective reps on the third one here.
So, when we look at that.
Okay, add all that up.
That gets us close.
It gets us close to that 12-ish number.
If we were to do the same thing here.
We said that this was one effective rep.
This was two effective reps.
This is three effective reps.
This is four effective reps.
Well it gets us, I believe, to like 12.
So, we're pretty close here
to being able to compare how many effective reps are there
in three sets of an average nine RPE,
versus four sets of an average 7.5,
versus four sets of an average 8.5.
So, this is what I'm using for the math right now
and we'll get this to you at a resource
at the end of the course,
but essentially if you just take the principle
of what I'm trying to do,
if I'm trying to use RPE or RIR as a volume metric.
I'm trying to get an estimate
of how many effective reps I'm accumulating
in each individual set,
and therefore across those sets,
to get an idea of what the net volume of effective reps was.
'Cause ultimately, keep in mind
that we're building the majority of these examples
around the mechanical tension principle,
the effective reps theory.
This is essentially what the most important metric
for the stimulus,
is how many effective reps
in terms of mechanical attention am I accumulating?
'Cause that's gonna be probably the main driver
of that hypertrophy stimulus.
So the next thing I want to just cover,
because we're gonna keep moving through,
implementing this stuff,
is right now we've gone through tonnage.
We've talked about adding different components to tonnage,
whether that's tempo, et cetera.
We've talked about using rep maxes,
we've talked about using RPEs and RIR.
We've talked about volume of work, volume of stimulus.
So, a lot of things.
And as we start going in these application things,
I just want you to keep in mind
that you can use any, all, or a combination of these things
that we've discussed so far.
It's important that you understand
the strengths and weaknesses of all of these.
Because you could essentially say, "You know what?
"I'm just gonna use that example that I just gave.
"I'm just gonna track like the RPE
"and the sets and that average,
"and just kind of work with an estimate
"of how many effective reps,
"and that's gonna be the only metric that I look at."
You could do that.
Would it maybe be beneficial to also track tonnage
and look at that so that you could kind of
get an assessment of how much just work volume
is going up as you're progressing
or maintaining the relative effective reps
and volume of stimulus that you're going for?
Could that maybe help you identify
when maybe things aren't becoming,
or you're losing efficiency,
or maybe you're under-recovering,
or have the foresight to know
that you're going to need to make
some dietary adjustments or whatnot
because your work volume is going up et cetera,
or it's going down, whatever it may be?
I think having
a measure of work
and stimulus,
at least one in each of those categories,
is a really good, minimal, viable way
to go about programming.
But are you gonna need to use rep max
and RPE and all of these other things?
Need, I don't know.
It just really depends on the level you're working with,
and the detail that you're gonna go through
and what's gonna be feasible for that client,
that athlete, et cetera.
So again, the goal is for you to be able to use
the right tool for the right job.
And for some individuals,
you may use a very small number of these,
because that's all it takes for them.
For another person, you may use a lot of these,
because you need to be more detail oriented.
So, there's the value.
There's a high reward
for the amount of work that that takes.
Obviously, the more numbers that you put on,
the more complicated those decisions can become,
but also the more refined and specific,
and probably the more preemptive
that decision making can be.
So, having more data than you need may not be helpful,
but having the data that you need
when you need it is also extremely helpful.
So, keep that in context as we go through these.
I'm just gonna keep reiterating that,
because I know it's a lot of information,
a lot of numbers.
When we start going through the examples,
you'll really start to see
how we use this stuff and when it's valuable
and when it's just kind of noise.
And the other thing is we're gonna take these things.
Right now we've been looking at them
mostly in single sets or occasionally
we've been looking at maybe a string of sets.
Is that we're gonna be able to look at some of these things
in the context of the volume and progression
of a whole workout and the whole program.
And so while it may seem like,
"Well, okay this maybe isn't that valuable
"on a single set metric,"
having that data over the course of a program,
a workout, et cetera, may be very valuable
in terms of your decision making in terms of
net weekly volume, when you want to add sets,
when you want to deload, et cetera.
And that's kind of one we're gonna go through
in some of these practical examples.
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