You might have heard lifters talk about RPE and RIR but never fully understand the concept. In this article, we’ll break it down for you and tell you how to effectively use it in your training.
Both RPE and RIR are ways to implement autoregulation into your workouts. This can help to adjust workout intensity and volume to your daily performance and recovery levels, making the most out of your workouts according to your current condition.
Whether you’re pushing for a new personal best or just trying to stay consistent, understanding and applying autoregulation can help you train smarter, reduce the risk of injury, and keep making progress.
The RPE Scale in Strength Training
The rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) has a long history and was first invented by the Swede Gunnar Borg. The original scale is from 6 to 20 and scores perceiveed effort from 6 (no effort at all) to 20 (absolute maximum, exhaustion).
However, Mike Tuchscherer from Reactive Training Systems popularized the RPE scale, which is now used by lifters, especially powerlifters. His scale tells how heavy a set feels on a scale from 6 to 10, where a higher number indicates greater effort and ten is the maximum.
For example, an RPE of 8 suggests you could perform two more reps before failure.
The RIR Scale in Strength Training
Reps in Reserve is basically the same concept as RPE, but you write how many additional repetitions you could have done before reaching failure. So, if the lift in my example above is RPE 8, the same life would be 2 RIR.
The RIR scale is often described as a scale of 1 to 10. However, it’s not common to use it over 5 RIR. This is both because it’s hard to estimate your RIR correctly so far from failure1 and because it’s not very effective to work out so far from failure, and also because it’s not very reliable in regards to calculating your estimated 1RM.
Benefits of Using RPE and RIR in Strength Training
Customization of the Workload to Your Current Conditions
One of the biggest benefits of using RPE and RIR in your training is that you have the opportunity to adjust according to your daily conditions.
Factors like how well you’ve slept and eaten, how stressed you are, and your previous workouts can all influence your performance on any given day. With the help of RPE or RIR, you have the opportunity to autoregulate your workouts, ensuring that you’re training effectively without overexerting yourself, which can lead to injury or burnout.
The added flexibility provided by RPE and RIR is good if you need to make real-time adjustments during your workouts. For instance, if your program tells you to lift a certain weight for a given number of reps, but you find that the weight feels heavier than expected, you can use the RPE or RIR scale to adjust the load. It works the other way around as well: If you feel stronger than usual, you have the opportunity to increase the weight a bit.
This allows you to maintain a good level of intensity and volume to continue making progress, even when conditions change from one day to another.
Offers Insights into Your Strength Progression
By consequently entering RPE or RIR into your sets, it will help give you a more correct e1RM. If you rate a lift easier on the RPE/RIR scale, it will give you a higher estimated 1RM. So, if you’re doing the same weight two weeks in a row, logging how it felt with help from RPE/RIR can help you see if you’re moving in the right direction.
This gives you additional insight that can help you decide your next move in training. Whether you’re planning to ramp up the intensity or dial it back for recovery, this will help to ensure that your efforts contribute directly to your goals.
Read more: 1RM vs PR Definition: What’s the Difference?
How to Implement RPE or RIR into Your Workout Routine
Starting to implement RPE or RIR can be quite difficult. It’s easy to either overestimate your strength or listen too much to the voices in your head saying that this is too hard!
It takes some time to tune into it, so here are some tips along the way:
- Start light. It’s better to underestimate your efforts in the beginning, as this will help you avoid injuries and give you room to adjust along the way.
- Be consistent. Try to rate all your working sets in the beginning. The more analyzing you’ll do, the better you’ll be at estimating RPE/RIR.
- Analyze. It’s a good idea to keep track of your ratings, preferably with video recordings of these sets. This way, you can go back and look at your previous ratings, reflect, and fine-tune them.
- Listen to objective measures. RPE and RIR are subjective measures, but you can always fine-tune them and learn how to rate them by looking at other objective factors. One example is bar speed. If you’ve been training for some time, you might have learned how much the bar speed decreases when you are 1–2 reps away from failure. You could also use velocity-based training tools and look at videos of previous sets to compare bar speeds.
By following these examples, you can effectively incorporate RPE and RIR into your strength training routine, leading to more personalized, flexible, and efficient workouts.
To make the most out of your RPE or RIR tracking, we highly recommend using a tool that could help you analyze your progress. In our workout log app StrengthLog, you not only have the possibility to log RPE or RIR, but we also have all the tools you need to analyze your performance afterward. Let’s go through them together.
The Logging
This is how an active workout looks in our app. As you can see, some of the sets have the option to enter RPE or RIR. You can activate this on a set basis or on an exercise basis (read more about how in our help desk here). This way, you can easily enter your RPE or RIR, and in the next session, you can look at the previous one to see how it felt and try to improve this time.
Calculating Your Next Weight
While training with RPE/RIR, it’s quite common to have a training program that doesn’t have a set weight but a set number of reps and a target RPE. Our RPE calculator can help you estimate your next weight, which is a helpful tool for keeping your workouts effective.
Analyzing Your Progress
If you consistently use RPE or RIR, it will be easier to spot trends in your training since the estimated 1RM will be more accurate. By creating reports looking at parameters like training volume, estimated 1RM, average RPE, and fatigue, you’ll get a good overview and be able to tell if you’re on the right track or not.
Summary
Hopefully, you’ll feel that you have a better insight into what RPE and RIR are and how to use it. Regardless if you want to use it or not, we highly recommend keeping track of your workouts.
In our workout tracker app, which you can download for free using the buttons below, you have the possibillity to log all your workouts and keep track of your progression.
StrengthLog is 100% free, but our premium version offers additional benefits, including the possibility to log RPE or RIR and the RPE calculator.
Want to try premium? We offer all new users a free 14-day trial of premium, which you can activate in the app.
