What the RPE. You are such an RIR

There is so much content you could consume on both RPE and RIR. A lot of it though will not leave you satisfied or worse give you the wrong takeaway. Thisbrief summary will be all you need if you yourself are not educating others. Mostly for those having trouble with consistency.

RPE- Rate of Percieved Exertion… Basicially scale of 1-10 how hard was a given set of exercise 1-nap 10- save me

RIR- Reps in Reserve. How many reps were you away from completley failing on an exercise

So much research and evidence on this topic especially in the last 20 years. We don’t need all the details here. Just know how much total exercise you do through the week effects how intensely you can/maybe should exercise. I would recomend tracking if for awhile, who cares how, just write it down and measure against yourself. If you only have time for once a week, in my opinion find yourself a second day. Now that you have two days a week. You will probably need to train pretty hard during those days to see any reasonable progress towards your goals. The big variable becomes when you have some form of acute or chronic injury, training harder is very likely going to make it harder to recover from that injury, or maintain a techinique that feels comfortable. So to save youself from feeling like you are playing catch up and training harder than you can actaully handle that day or at that time, which I see far too often, simply make 30 minutes of time to exercise most days if you fall on the busy side of things. That way you will have the ability to push hard when you have more time. This is mostly for just normal people who still actually care about thier goals. It is harder than “experts” give credit to in keeping good technique in sets with high RPE. So what do you do? Without making this too wordy. Have build up sets. See how it feels as you increase intensity. Use those sets to remind yourself of what form feels best. OPTIMAL is training in a way that DOES NOT HURT. So if you were told RPE of 7-10 is best but your are staring a new movement or one that sometimes feels stiff. Train in a way that gets you 5% less gains for 2 weeks and get used to it.

On the other side of things. If you have been training for months. Have no current injuries or aches that you consistenly notice on the same thing and havent been sore at all. Training harder is almost always better even if what you are doing is kind of “Dumb”. What this means is as long as you dont hurt youself and buld up over time. Your body will most likely get better at the thing you are doing. Some things have more carry over and specifity. Some things also take much longer to adapt to than others. All that said if you just did what didn’t hurt got sweaty every week, got sore a bit every week. If it is lifting weights, doing only calisthenics, swiming, yoga, or sports you have to challenge yourself consistently.

Decide what you want, BE CONSISTENT, be confident and don’t overthink it.