Why Calculate RPE & E1RM? Why it’s Important for Strength Training
This past week PRS online barbell training client Janet S. competed at the Canadian Powerlifting Union Nationals. She had a fantastic performance going 8/9, hitting an all-time bench and deadlift personal record (PR), total meet PR, and took Silver in the Master's II 76kg weight class.
But a few weeks ago, Janet was feeling down and in the dumps about her powerlifting competition training. Her deadlift felt incredibly heavy, and she even failed a lighter bench press load than what she ultimately hit in the meet a few weeks later.
While this could upset any powerlifter four weeks out from a competition, Janet and her online powerlifting coach, Dr. Rori Alter, PT, were able to keep their cool.
Why? Because of the data.
Like all powerlifters and barbell strength trainees at PRS, Janet and her coach track specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and data trends over time that help them:
Make training program decisions within and across training sessions
Plan for competition
Peak for competition
Gauge progress and performance in ways other than the load on the bar
Ward off training injuries
Reduce the possibility of overtraining
You might be thinking, "I'm not a competitive powerlifter, so I don't need to track these, and I don't need anything but pen and paper to track my training."
But we're here to share all the reasons you should track specific data regardless of your competitive nature. You can also read our free 6-point RPE descriptor scale here.
The 3 most important reasons you should track your barbell training data (RPE & E1RM) include:
To monitor your progress without focusing on the number on the bar or maxing out regularly
To catch warning signs of injury and overtraining before it's too late
To have a record of what you did last week, last month, and last year
You may be thinking:
"I keep a training journal; I have that info."
Or, "I have a spreadsheet with all my reps, sets, and load for the main barbell lifts. Do I really need more?"
The short answer is, yes - if you truly want to:
✓ Maximize your strength and muscular development
✓ Reduce your injury risk
✓ Optimize your goal attainment
✓ Instill longevity in your barbell training
Then yes, you could stand to do more data tracking and analysis.
There's so much more to tracking your powerlifting training and barbell training.
In our previous article on Managing Barbell Training Fatigue, we talked about three key performance indicators to train in your training.
However, in this article, we're taking it a little further and discussing the 3 MOST crucial Key Performance Indicators for barbell training & powerlifting.
Differential RPE
Average Exercise RPE
Exercise Estimated 1 Rep Max
Ultimately, what we're about to share with you regarding tracking your barbell training and powerlifting data will lead to long-term sustainability and optimal goal attainment without interruption.
Are you ready to always enjoy training and hit PR after PR without getting injured?
Let's dive in!
Stepping up your tracking game will help you make more informed programming decisions, achieve long-term progress, and better understand your performance and recovery.
Through the PRS Sustainable Training Method lens, we'll answer, "what should you track in your training program" to maximize your goal attainment and reduce your injury risk in barbell training. We'll also discuss why it's important to track trends and how that will help you.
Tracking training trends and data is different than keeping a training log.
A Training Log is a simple log of the exercises performed. It can be a pen and paper journal, spreadsheet, word document, or simple smartphone app where you keep a log of the reps, sets, and loads you performed on particular days. Or, it could be something as uniquely complex as the PRS Sustainable Training Logs.
Tracking Training Data and Trends is more specific than the simple surface-level data logging of reps, sets, load, and date.
Tracked Barbell Training Trends is the conversion of training performed into usable data that paints a picture of performance, recovery, and progress over time.
Here at PRS, and within the Sustainable Training Method, we utilize Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and Estimated 1 Repetition Maximum (E1RM) to create standardized data for every training session to compare and analyze in the same way every time.
How can we turn the raw barbell training or powerlifting training data into standardized information to compare and track overtime?
Before we discuss how to create standardized data in training, let's talk about what objective, raw data we have that is easy and accessible to everyone:
Absolute Load: This is the weight of the plates plus the barbell and will be a constant no matter who performs the set. This is an objective value.
Set Volume: This is the total number of reps performed per set and will also be a constant no matter who performed the set. This is an objective value.
Exercise Type: The type of exercise performed is precisely that. You performed the low bar back squat, sumo deadlift, conventional deadlift, box squats, etc. This will generally be a constant no matter who or where the set was performed. However, there may be slight deviations in bar placement, stance, equipment, etc. This is generally an objective value, though it is slightly subjective because of the small amount of deviation in performance. However, we'll regularly commit to this being an objective piece of data.
Relative Intensity: This is how hard the exercise feels during and immediately after it is performed and is entirely subjective based on the individual's experience and perception. Relative Intensity can be measured in many ways, including words like easy, hard, very hard, max effort, or number values like Rating of Perceived Exertion or Reps in Reserve.
The most important thing is to create a standardized value for each working set within a training session. This will allow us to compare the same exercises across different training sessions with various volumes and intensities.
In the PRS Sustainable Training Method, we do this by assigning every barbell training working set an RPE. RPE is a standardized subjective measure of relative intensity or the training set's internal stress on you.
RPE is how hard you feel like you're working and considers your perceptions of:
Heart rate
Body temperature
Breathing rate
Sweating
Muscle fatigue
RPE is influenced by:
Physical stress
Psychological stress
Nutrition
Hydration
Recovery
Sleep
RPE, load, and reps performance can give us a standardized measure of performance and recovery through a particular calculation we call Estimated 1 Repetition Maximum.
E1RM is the estimated maximal weight you could lift for one repetition based on your performance in training. The E1RM formula accounts for the load used, the number of reps performed, and your RPE for a given set. Though this isn't an actual one rep max that you've tested, the E1RM is typically in the ballpark of where your 1RM would be if you tested it on that day and time. Please note that sometimes, the E1RM is a little higher than the 1RM.
We can use E1RM to measure training performance over time by assessing its trend.
We want to see E1RM increase over time. But, due to normal fluctuations and variations in recovery and external training factors, E1RM won't always increase from session to session even if the program is optimal, and that's okay.
If you start to see E1RM go down or plateau over multiple sessions, this is likely an indication that you need a program change to allow fatigue to dissipate and performance to improve.
E1RM should always be trending up. That doesn't mean that you'll always see a linear upward trend, but you'll likely see it dip and then increase when you need a program change or after making a program change.
So when you look at your e1RM trends over a long period, they should be increasing. A sustained upward trend with infrequent dips in E1RM suggests that fatigue is managed well, allowing performance to remain high.
When E1RM trends downward for more than 2-3 sessions in a row, fatigue is accumulating beyond what is recoverable with a minor adjustment to relative training load. This situation would require a deload to dissipate fatigue, and deloads don't push the needle forward.
When we see oscillations or downward trends in E1RM, it suggests training stress and fatigue that are not managed well.
Things You Should Monitor & Respond To In Training To Avoid Extended Periods of High Training Fatigue:
→ High RPEs (9+)
→ Downward, plateauing or undulating E1RM is trends
E1RM is a measure of fatigue and recovery because it accounts for the weight lifted, reps completed, and RPE of the set. For details on calculating E1RM, head here after reading this article!
It's the CHANGE in E1RM that will indicate if training fatigue and recovery aren't in check. Simply looking at one data point for E1RM won't tell you much, so the trends and changes in E1RM over time paint the bigger picture of what's going on.
→ When reps and load are held constant but RPE increases, E1RM will decrease.
→ When reps and load are held constant, but RPE decreases, E1RM will increase
→ If you are recovering well and training fatigue is in check, your E1RM should always move in a positive direction.
→ If you are recovering poorly and training fatigue is accumulating too high, then your E1RM will likely move in the negative direction.
Suppose your sets are getting significantly harder (RPE increasing) while only adding a small amount of weight. In that case, the E1RM will reflect that, indicating poor recovery or high fatigue levels.
For example, if you do 5 reps x 5 sets at 225 at RPE of 7.5 and during your next session you do 5 reps x 5 sets at 230 at RPE 9, your E1RM will go down.
This is how we use E1RM as a measure of fatigue and recovery. When you see that downward trend continue or your E1RM plateaus over multiple sessions, you probably need a program change to reduce training stress, dissipate fatigue, and allow for more recovery (even if the fatigue comes from factors outside of the gym).
However, we hope that by monitoring specific KPIs in your barbell training, you never put yourself or your clients in a position where E1RM oscillates or trends downward. We'll share something with you at the end of this article to help you avoid this situation!
We recommend tracking E1RM for each exercise because the calculations provide an instantaneous and easily acquired measurement of performance, training fatigue, and recoverability. We'll share how to make this easy shortly!
When intra workout or inter workout training fatigue is high and recovery is poor, we see a decline in performance (E1RM) and an increased risk of injury.
By tracking your performance through Estimated 1 Rep Max, you're getting information about your performance, fatigue levels, and recovery. These are the most important things to keep in check to reduce injury risk and keep performance high.
Having a visual representation of performance, fatigue, and recovery helps in making intelligent training decisions and programming adjustments to manage fatigue before you:
❌ Stall out
❌ Get weaker
❌ Get injured
In barbell training and powerlifting training, you should regularly assess your performance on a micro and macro scale.
The PRS Sustainable Training Method means looking at your RPE and E1RM trends on a set-to-set, exercise-to-exercise, session-to-session, week-to-week, month-to-month, and annual basis.
(If that recommendation overwhelms you, hang tight, we'll give you an effortless way to do all that shortly!)
Why is tracking and assessing your RPE and E1RM trends so important?
Assessing RPE and E1RM trends help with:
1. Maximizing Strength & Muscular Development:
The main programming factors affecting strength and muscular development are total training stress and recovery.
By utilizing RPE, which is a measure of relative intensity, we can gauge if the training stress is within the acceptable range for the program's intention.
For instance, if we're working on a hypertrophy block, we may intend for the training stress to be moderate. If we notice the RPE is 9+ on average, this would indicate that the training stress is higher than intended in the program and could have poor implications for recovery.
Additionally, by calculating and tracking E1RM over time, we can measure our strength development and recovery between and across sessions.
→ If the E1RM trend is continuous in the positive direction, it indicates that our training stress and recovery from training are balanced, and we're getting stronger.
→ If E1RM is oscillating or trending down, it's an indication that something is off with training stress and/or recovery and something needs to be adjusted to allow for them to align again. Conversely, once that E1RM begins to trend up again, you know you have made the correct adjustment to accommodate training stress and recovery.
2. Reducing Injury Risk:
We've said it before (in other articles and posts), and we'll repeat it, but you cannot prevent injury. The only thing you can do is get all your ducks in a row and do what you can to reduce injury risk.
The main programming factors for reducing injury risk are:
Keeping Acute & Chronic Training Fatigue Within an Appropriate Range: Hopefully, at this point, you understand that RPE is a measure of your perception of how hard a set feels.
We can use RPE descriptively to monitor the acute accumulation of fatigue within an exercise, training session, and training week on a micro-scale. Acute Fatigue is measured by the Differential RPE, Average Exercise RPE, and Session RPE. It develops from performance fatigue, nutrition or hydration influences, current psychological and physical stress outside of training on that day or week, and poor sleep and recovery.
→ Differential RPE is the change in RPE from the first set to the last set of your working weight for one lift. Example A below shows how the RPE stays relatively consistent, rising only .5 RPE from the first set to the last set. This indicates that there wasn't significant fatigue accumulating across the sets. However, in Example B, you can see a 2.5 point rise in RPE from the first set to the last set, meaning that a high amount of fatigue was carried over from set to set. Therefore, the recommended Differential RPE we recommend as an appropriate amount of fatigue to accumulate within an exercise is about 1-1.5 RPE, barring the Exercise Average RPE is also in an appropriate range.
→ Exercise Average RPE is the calculated average RPE of all the sets of one exercise. It can give us a general picture of how much fatigue an exercise produces and compare our fatigue from session to session. For example, in the PRS Sustainable Training Method, we use the rolling Exercise Average RPE across three training sessions to determine if chronic fatigue is starting to accumulate. We also use this value to determine if the stress of the exercise is within the intended range to produce the desired result of the barbell training program.
→ Session RPE is the total average RPE of all the exercises within a training session. We can monitor Session RPE across training sessions and identify if it's been elevated above a predetermined RPE for a predetermined allowable amount of time.
Therefore, we should regularly track, monitor, and assess our RPE to make finely tuned adjustments on an exercise and session-to-session basis to reduce acute and chronic fatigue accumulation and reduce our risk for barbell training or powerlifting injuries.
Ensuring Recovery From Training Occurs: When Exercise Average RPE and Session RPE have been elevated to 9 or above for too long, we fall into high risk for barbell training and powerlifting injuries, non-functional overreaching, and overtraining.
On a macro scale, we can use RPE and E1RM to monitor and assess accumulated fatigue across training weeks and months by:
→ Comparing the Average RPE of individual lifts week to week
→ Monitoring rises in Session RPE over time
→ Following the E1RM trend
These trends can provide us insight into the fatigue rate of each lift and the lifter as a whole. We can use lift-specific and session-specific fatigue measures to make SMALL adjustments to individual lifts on an as-needed basis rather than completely rewriting or resetting the training program.
If we circle back to the example of Janet we discussed earlier, we did exactly that. Janet had a lousy deadlift week about ten weeks out from CPU Nationals.
This isn't unusual for advanced lifters; not every week is great, so we gave it another week, and things started to move well again.
However, despite her feeling better in training, her E1RM trend over a few weeks told us a different story. Her deadlift E1RM started to oscillate and then trend downward.
Because we keep a detailed record of her training trends, this didn't scare us as we've seen and recovered from this E1RM behavior quickly in the past.
I knew that if we implemented a low-stress week for her deadlift, it would recover in time to hit a PR in the competition ideally.
So at four weeks out, we deloaded her deadlift only and watched her E1RM climb back up just in time for a lifetime personal best at the CPU Nationals.
3. Optimizing Goal Attainment:
From a "big picture" standpoint, tracking these three KPIs help us achieve the goals we set out as lifters or with our clients by providing a few things:
E1RM & RPE track progress, performance, and fatigue without expensive or invasive measurement tools. Having this data readily available and converted (we'll show you how shortly) gives you a visual representation of data to make programming adjustments on a lift-by-lift basis. This helps reduce the risk of injuries and complete program overhauls like we discussed in this article.
The data and training trends we're talking about help you stay motivated without regular 1 Rep Max testing, test days, mock meets, etc., that interfere with continuous training progress. 1RM testing, mock meets, and frequent competition require a lot of recovery. The more time you spend testing and recovering, the less time you spend getting stronger.
For instance, maybe you feel like you're "stuck" at 225 because you've come to it again for 5s across. However, if you compare the most recent RPE for 225 x 5 to past training, you may find that last year you did 225 x 5 @ RPE 9 for one top set, six months ago you did it for 225 x 5 @ 8.5 for on top set, and now you're doing 225 x 5 x 3 sets with all three sets in the RPE 7.5-8.5 range.
Of particular interest and importance, tracking E1RM trends for each lift is where the money is at when determining if you've made progress or not. Why? Because E1RM can help you see the big picture over time which is often hard to see when you're not competing or testing regularly.
Look at your RPE and E1RM trends on a session-to-session, week-to-week, and annual basis. For example, you might find that your E1RM dipped in the past week, but it's still higher than it was a month or a year ago.
Training trends don't just indicate when you need a program change; they help to keep you level-headed when you're having a bad training session or week. Look at the big picture and determine if your progress is stalling. If it's not, consider what outside factors might affect your performance. Did you have a few nights of poor sleep? Has work been stressful? Do you have family or relationship stress?
Whatever it is, it might explain your recent training trends and indicate a need to keep moving forward or make an adjustment to accommodate your demands outside of barbell training.
4. Supporting Longevity in Barbell Training & Powerlifting:
The most important thing is that: Differential RPE, Average Exercise RPE, and E1RM help you progress your training for longer with fewer setbacks gaining more ground, strength, and goal attainments over time.
These three KPIs are most important in the PRS Sustainable Training Method because they help us identify training fatigue accumulation BEFORE it's a problem. In addition, if we can identify training fatigue in multiple different ways (within a training session, between training sessions, and across weeks) for each lift and the lifter as a whole, we can:
Catch early warning signs of non-functional overreaching and injury
Make minor tweaks on a lift by lift basis rather than deloading an entire program or resetting individual lifts
Support steady and sustained progress rather than periods of detraining and rebuilding.
By tracking these KPIs and the methods outlined in this article, the PRS Sustainable Training Method uses repeated linear progression for novice, intermediate, and advanced lifters instead of block periodization methods to make uninterrupted sustainable progress towards your individual goals.
You might be thinking, "this sounds like a lot of work; do I REALLY need to track all of this?"
YES, you do!
If you're not tracking your training trends, you're programming in the dark.
If you don't have a history of your RPEs, you don't have enough information to make the optimal changes at the right time. And if you're not tracking your E1RM trends… you have absolutely no clue what your fatigue, recovery, and performance (as measured through E1RM) are doing over time.
Your progress could be tanking for weeks, you could be dealing with a couple of nagging injuries, and your frustration could be rising for months, and you'll have no clue as to why.
If you track the key performance indicators we discuss in this article, you'll see the critical trends that will help you know what to change in your program before it becomes a problem.
And the key is BEFORE it becomes a problem.
You're probably thinking: "So…how do I track my barbell workouts?"
Well, don't worry. As usual, we've got you covered.
Apps and coaching platforms like True Coach, My Strength Book, the Starting Strength App, and other gym tracker apps just don't cover all the bases for tracking the important training trends leading to long-term sustainability in barbell training and powerlifting. These apps and systems also don't store and present training data and trends in a way that's easy to reference. It's not easy to track these variables without an advanced spreadsheet with formulas built in, but it takes an extraordinary amount of time and energy to create that and make it user-friendly.
We recommend using Google Sheets to create a simple spreadsheet for your main barbell lifts at a minimum.
It would be best to track, at minimum, average RPE and E1RM trends for the main lifts in each training session. It's a little complicated to create the formula for E1RM, but if you're a computer, financial, or numbers person, you may be able to program your E1RM column to calculate it based on the load, reps, and average RPE. But if not, you can keep the formula handy and quickly calculate it by hand and enter it into your spreadsheet OR see below.
The ideal situation is to track individual exercise RPE, differential RPE, session RPE, and E1RM and compare these trends across sessions, training weeks, months, and years.
We want you to have access to the necessary tools to track your training trends and use that information to create sustainability in your barbell training program, so we did the hard work for you.
There has never been an app or coaching platform that genuinely meets the needs of the Sustainable Training Method, so we created the PRS Sustainable Training Log and want to share it with you.
The PRS Sustainable Training Log tracks everything discussed in this article on an exercise, session, weekly, and annual basis AND highlights when something is on the verge of intervention. The main goal of the Sustainable Training Log is to help you better coach yourself or your athletes for continual goal attainment with minimal injury risk.
Whether you're an athlete, coach, or clinician, you can have access to our Sustainable Training Log and more. Watch this video to take a tour of our system and get on our waiting list so you get alerted when the entire system is available in June!