The Knowledge by Wahoo

All the Feels: Why you should consider training by feel / Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE).

Episode Summary

Before heart rate monitors and power meters, endurance athletes used to train solely by Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). Wahoo Sports Science coaches Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Mac Cassin look at how RPE works and outline the benefits and the limitations of training by feel.

Episode Notes

Recent advantages in technology have made training with power or heart rate more affordable and accessible. But before we had power targets and heart rate zones, endurance athletes used to train solely by feel, also known as Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). In this episode of The Knowledge, Wahoo Sports Science coaches Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Mac Cassin discuss the benefits and limitations of taking off your heart rate monitor, unplugging your power meter, and training the good old fashioned way. Get ready to get in touch with your feelings. The doctor is in.

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Extra: Episode 3

 

Episode Transcription

Mac Cassin  0:00  

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge Podcast by Wahoo. I am Mac Cassin senior sports scientist.

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:06  

And I'm Dr . Jinger Gottschall, Director of applied research. Today Mac, we are going to talk about RPE

 

Mac Cassin  0:13  

Regular physical education

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:15  

Or,  respiratory protective equipment.

 

Mac Cassin  0:19  

Are you talking about revenue per email?

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:21  

No rapid prototyping environment.

 

Mac Cassin  0:24  

So not remote program execution,

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:26  

or repair parts estimate

 

Mac Cassin  0:29  

or related payroll expenses.

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:31  

The one I want to talk about is actually retinal pigment epithelium. Does that sound fun to you?

 

Mac Cassin  0:36  

It does. I think it might be a little off-topic.

 

Jinger Gottschall  0:38  

Shoot! Okay, fine. RPE for us here at Wahoo is the rate of perceived exertion. This is actually a term since I've been in the field for a couple of decades now is one that I've been utilizing, since the very beginning, it is what you can utilize as a subjective physiological marker, meaning it's giving you an estimate of your intensity. Now we can actually measure intensity by things like heart rate and glycogen depletion, oxygen consumption, or

 

Mac Cassin  1:14  

power, like from the new Powerlink pedals. Oh,

 

Jinger Gottschall  1:17  

gosh, you're so quick on these little marketing jibs. I love it. Yes, power output for sure. And blood lactate is another one. If we're talking about physiological, I would consider power to be a little bit more on the mechanical but let's not split hairs here. The bottom line is it's a much more simple measure, and all sorts of individuals who care about how you feel during exercise, utilize it. So we're talking about doctors, scientists, coaches, athletes themselves will actually track this throughout a training period. And it's actually demonstrated to be a measure that you can utilize to maximize your performance. And at the same time, you can then minimize any potential overtraining, overreaching, or injury at the same time.

 

Mac Cassin  2:07  

Yeah, because one of the issues with some of those, those measures like saying, heart rate, something like that, as you get into periods of heavy training, your max heart rate, your hurry, the forgiven effort can drop all these other variables can be impacted by essentially where you're at in your training cycle. But RPE is, it's how you're feeling. And that can be maybe the numbers are a little, but it's feeling really hard. And that's still the RPE. That's really how your body's reacting to it. Exactly.

 

Jinger Gottschall  2:33  

And so you can see how a coach, a trainer, even somebody that's a clinician of yours would benefit by knowing how you actually feel. Research has shown that individuals typically base this value on their heart rate, their breathing rate, maybe their sweat rate, and just how they're feeling at a local level in terms of muscle fatigue. So you're kind of putting all these feelings together into one subjective measure.

 

Mac Cassin  3:01  

And we actually do go into that in our episode three of three metrics to help you train with purpose, where we're Neil and I talk about how to use power, heart rate, and RPE, all at the same time. And the main takeaway of that is RPE is the most important, which is why it gets its whole own episode.

 

Jinger Gottschall  3:16  

This is so special. And again, another selfless plug from now, we should have a special sound effect for that. Get on our producer Edie. Now let's actually talk about the basics of this, which is the scale, the scale that we utilize currently is a zero to 10 scale, where zero is absolutely no effort. And 10 is going to maximal exertion. So you can basically give yourself from easy to hard, and everything in between your first times that you're actually evaluating a workout, you may didn't think about a little bit, but as you become more practice to this, it's a very quick way to assess your current feeling.

 

Mac Cassin  3:58  

Yeah, as you get used to it, if you can be disciplined for a couple of weeks, and really pay attention to the RPE while you're writing, it becomes second nature that you can really start to just dial and know instantly what you feel like you're trying to pace, any sort of effort. That's such a massive component of it.

 

Jinger Gottschall  4:13  

Yes, it's super cool. And the other thing I think that is super cool is that if you track your RPE throughout a training cycle, and you track some other metrics, let's say like your hormone fluctuations, your nutrition, hydration, your life stress, environmental conditions, you'll see how RPE actually in parallel. And you can also evaluate which one of these factors is most important in determining how you feel. I will tell you, I don't want to confuse others because when I was in undergrad and grad school, we were using a scale that's six to 20. With a Borg scale,

 

Mac Cassin  4:51  

yeah. So let's do this. So the Borg scale, yes, six to 20. That's the first basically rendition of this getting feedback from test subjects about how they're feeling. And that six to 20 is actually originally more or less based on heart rate. And then resting heart rate was generally 60 for college males at the time. And then 200 was generally the max heart rate for again for the college males that were in this test group. So it made sense that okay, let's just lock this RPE into something we can measure your heart

 

Jinger Gottschall  5:21  

rate, right? Physiologically, pairs with this subjective measure, right?

 

Mac Cassin  5:26  

The problem is the human brain isn't super good at defining six as minimum and 20 as maximum. In the same way with Fahrenheit, we're not good at saying that water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212. It's a bit arbitrary.

 

Jinger Gottschall  5:41  

Exactly. And we do also know that heart rate isn't the only thing that influences our subjective perception of intensity, there are other things going on. And in fact, the nervous system probably has the largest influence overall. And it's your sensory neurons. They're called afferent neurons, a Ferrant. They are giving you feedback based upon Yes, your cardiac muscle, your heart, but in addition to skeletal muscle, and lungs, as well as what are called interceptors that are also helping you understand how you feel as a whole.

 

Mac Cassin  6:16  

It's really fascinating when you learn about all the different sensors your body has from McKinna receptors to chemoreceptors to bear receptors, all these different things that give you feedback that you're in no way cognitively aware of, but that just speaks to that little back part of your brain telling you okay, this is getting harder, this is getting harder. This is easy. Its man is physiology.

 

Jinger Gottschall  6:36  

It is it's fascinating. And what I love is, it's redundant, meaning you're getting a lot of similar information from these different receptors. But it's extremely protective, we are constantly evaluating if we can really go any further in order to make sure that we're not getting injured, take taking it to the limit,

 

Mac Cassin  6:58  

right? Good Old Central Governor theory, you have a little something in the back of your brain saying, if you go any harder, you might die, it's not

 

Jinger Gottschall  7:06  

good to be good. And just as you can at times over, override this. And for some athletes, it's training yourself to get over some of this discomfort. To be honest, your body won't let you take it too far. So

 

Mac Cassin  7:21  

it's pretty good at protecting. So with all that being said, so okay, we're talking about a zero to 10 scale here. What's What is the first what are those numbers represents? We've got zero being absolutely nothing and being the absolute max. Correct. What about those in-betweens,

 

Jinger Gottschall  7:36  

let's start from the beginning. If you are going to rate your exertion, a one-two or three, then that's going to be the warmup period, the cooldown, it's the lowest intensity that you can maintain for periods of time, basically, without stopping and without going faster,

 

Mac Cassin  7:54  

right. So it's it's like the borderline of extreme boredom.

 

Jinger Gottschall  7:58  

Exactly. And you could have conversations. So this is when you go on that walk or easy ride, and you're with a buddy, and you're just chatting it up.

 

Mac Cassin  8:08  

Yeah, like you said, already breathing is a really good indicator here, which is kind of how I like to think about some of these different values. So if you think to the next step four to five, that's really your endurance, your zone to base, whatever have you whatever terminology you want to use there. And that's when Okay, your breathing is starting to increase. But you can still talk in full sentences, you're not getting four words out, taking a breath or more words, getting like that's not people say I was still having a conversation, but they're blocking their sentence with a breath. That's not a four or five, that's not a four or five, that's not going to that's no bass. So if you're supposed to do a bass ride, and you realize you can't get a full sentence out without taking a breath, you need to dial it back

 

Jinger Gottschall  8:47  

a bit. But exactly what you just described in terms of talking and phrases, that's when you get into tempo, which is an RPE that we like to estimate our round a six, you're breathing heavy, it's still controlled. So that's one thing I like to do or evaluate, especially when I'm doing a climb is can I count my breaths at a regular interval. And if so, I'm still in this RPE of six or tempo zone, only able to talk in phrases.

 

Mac Cassin  9:17  

So then above tempos, then threshold which we usually talk about a seven to eight. And this is, is interesting, because there's, you know, there's functional threshold power, there's running threshold pace, there's also ventilatory threshold, which is around this point to and this is when you do get, you know, you start to get a shift in breathing where even as the effort goes up in a linear fashion, the rate of breathing starts to increase more than that. And that's for me personally, when I'm doing threshold efforts, that's a really key component what I pay attention to if I'm going too hard, if I start breathing really fast because I need all that oxygen, that's when I know this is not a threshold effort. I'm going above that.

 

Jinger Gottschall  9:55  

Got it and can you still tell your coach how you're feeling

 

Mac Cassin  9:59  

in Short, to one, two, maybe three-word bursts if they're all really short words, but not require and this is an effort, it requires concentration, maybe not for the first 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes. But once you get past that, it's difficult to keep yourself in that sort of realm.

 

Jinger Gottschall  10:14  

Absolutely. And then that takes us to our last RPA measure, which is a nine or a 10. And when you are very uncomfortable, you're to the point where breathing is difficult. And I think a term that Neil likes to use is this obnoxious internal dialogue, which I think is a fabulous descriptor. You are basically wanting to tell everybody to please get out of your way and make it stop.

 

Mac Cassin  10:42  

I know it might teammates, we call it chewing cork, because if your cork handlebar tape, you'd be all the way down your stem. Oh, just you're in court.

 

Jinger Gottschall  10:50  

Oh, I like that. Can I steal it? Of course. Alright. Now with this scale, there are actually different times and different types of RPE that we want to make sure you understand the differences. The one that we've basically been focusing on at this point is in workout RPE. And we're going to just give that a little prescript of an I love a good prescript. Is that even a thing? I know postscript is but it is now. Okay, from now on a prescript is I for RPE. And that is at that moment, what Mack and I have been chatting about until then, am I RPE? How are you feeling instantaneously? What is your exertion level? And that is still though, how are you feeling in your head? How are you feeling in your heart? How are you feeling in your lungs? And how are you feeling in your limbs all put together into one value? How do you feel right now?

 

Mac Cassin  11:47  

Yeah, and that's something we asked anytime we have someone in here in the lab and our testing them. At every stage, if we increase effort, we'll ask RPE, and like nine out of 10 people the first time I asked they'll give me an answer like two or three and nine out of 10 times. So ask Is that correct? That right? GEORGE is responding? Yes,

 

Jinger Gottschall  12:06  

absolutely. If it is how you feel at this moment? It is correct.

 

Mac Cassin  12:10  

That's what's beautiful about AI RPE? is there's no wrong answer. No, you can lie to yourself, but there is no wrong answer for how you feel

 

Jinger Gottschall  12:19  

exactly. Take that cumulative answer. And give us a number.

 

Mac Cassin  12:24  

The next type of RPE we call prescriptive RPE. So P RP. And this is what the system training app uses. When you get you get a target for a workout, you get a power target, you get a heart rate target, you get a cadence target, in this case, you get an RPE target. So it's not necessarily stating that this is where you feel right now, it's this is you should change your effort to try and get yourself to reach that exactly. Obviously, after a really hard interval. The next RPE is one, but right away, you don't feel a one. The idea is that, okay, if you see that it's a one RPE you know, you need to dial the effort way, way down to recover. And same when it jumps up to a 10. You just know, okay, I need to go as hard as I can

 

Jinger Gottschall  13:06  

max it out at the time. Brilliant. The last type of RPE that we're going to chat about is called PSR. It is a post-session rating. And you're going to be seeing a lot more of this in the future. And this is not what you're going to do prescriptive, it's not how you feel at the moment being in the workout, it is a post-exercise estimate. And this is very critical. It's 20 to 30 minutes after your workout. And it's more an evaluation of the workout as a whole. So if we think about four different variables, it would work interval intensity, the work interval duration, as well as your recovery interval intensity and the recovery interval duration. It's looking at all those variables at one time. What is your post-session rating? So the question then is, how was your workout? And the reason we're making such a big deal about this is that there's a huge difference between a few who asked me immediately after that last interval that was a P RPE of 10. And if you ask me 20 to 30 minutes later, you want the post-session rating to be an evaluation of the workout as a whole. So you need to look you need to separate yourself from its neck, right, and self some distance.

 

Mac Cassin  14:29  

And really nice. I mean, in what ginger was saying that it's a big difference. What she means by that is it's shown in a bunch of different studies that you will give a different numeric value immediately after a workout versus 20 to 30 minutes, and it's the 20 to 30 minute one that's important, because RPE can kind of be broken down into how you determine it. If there's a discomfort sort of version, you're viewing your RPE based on your current discomfort, and there's an RPE that's more like fatigue based like how you feel after the fact and that's where it becomes important that Again, as you said, If you finish a max 20-minute effort, and then two minutes cooldown and then you ask How hard was that, you're gonna say that was really hard. Now, it's still gonna be hard 2030 minutes later, but you might be able to say, Okay, I'm not completely smashed right now, if you're still lying on the ground or on the couch 30 minutes later, because yes, it was, it was up there,

 

Jinger Gottschall  15:17  

it was still an RPE of 10, regardless of when you ask,

 

Mac Cassin  15:21  

and there's another interesting component to it, there's a reward component to have it that you can kind of cloud things up in terms of the discomfort say you, you're at the end of a race, how you feel afterward if you know that you won, like, say, a time trial versus if you didn't win, yes, you'd give the same effort the whole time. But there's that big mental component of if you gave all out and you won, you're gonna be ecstatic, you're gonna say that was awesome. And you might rate it a bit, low or less, right. But if you lose, not great, and so that's what So Neil, his old email signature, but used to be, there is no tiredness on the Day of Victory. Which,

 

Jinger Gottschall  15:55  

that's fair, when you're on the top step of the podium, it's like a one, no effort at all? Well, it's just totally in the zone. What we've mentioned a couple of times is research-based upon this. And there are literally 1000s of articles that utilize this post-session rating as an indication of accumulated fatigue. And what I find so fascinating is that the bottom line, if you did a huge analysis on these 1000s, and 1000s of articles, is that this post-session rating is actually your most accurate in terms of being able to establish what your training load was. And if you are chronically or acutely fatigued, and what you need to do in terms of modifying your current training, it is even more accurate than any of those physiological or mechanical variables that we have mentioned before.

 

Mac Cassin  16:55  

With that, what you do with that value that you assign a workout, right, you multiply that by the duration to get a load and tracking that over time, exactly, then allows you so it's sort of like for those cycling, who know about intensity factor in TSS, you can kind of view PSR as your intensity factor, how hard was that? And then you can have a different value. That's more like a session or training load. Now, people don't like using the word load, because it's an engineering term. But we're not engineers, who were sports scientists, what's the

 

Jinger Gottschall  17:24  

unit? That unit? Let's not get into that?

 

Mac Cassin  17:27  

But yeah, so you there's a component where, you know, there's the PSR is just a rating of how difficult was and you can multiply that by the duration that Legendre saying becomes the best tracker of how your training is gone.

 

Jinger Gottschall  17:38  

Right? So no stress, if you leave for that ride, without your heartrate monitor, your watch, or your power meter. If you don't have your ticker, your rival your element, then just go out there and think about your RPE and your post-session rating.

 

Mac Cassin  17:57  

Yeah, get into your head, but in a good way, in a good way. Yes. And so on that psychology side point, there's, you know, a big emerging area of focus is something called that psychobiological model of exercise. It's interesting, it's sort of a chicken in the egg with RPE, in terms of what this model is essentially saying is that your capacity to perform is based on internal intrinsic factors, how you're feeling, what your motivation is, and that's a big determinant in exercise performance, not your threshold or vo two, Max.

 

Jinger Gottschall  18:28  

Right now, is this genetic? Is it trained? So

 

Mac Cassin  18:32  

that's the current million or however, however much exercise sports and recreation? And yeah, that's the million-dollar question. So there have been a lot of interesting studies that kind of look into this tolerance side of things. And the one I like the most is they took a bunch of swimmers. They took novice swimmers, so not very good swimmers. Amateurs, like, club people, people do it for fun, and then elite, professional Olympic level, okay, and they had them all stick their hand in a bucket of ice water. Hmm. And what they were trying to look at was the pain threshold. Okay, the point at which it becomes painful to have your hand in a bucket of water, and then pain tolerance, which is okay, how long can you keep your hand you maintain it? Right. And what they found was that pain threshold was reached essentially, at the same point for the novice, regardless of your ability, regardless of ability. What was different is that the elites were able to they had much greater pain times, they could hold their hand in the bucket for like, twice as long as the amateurs and the amateurs could do it for like 50% As long as the novices, right. And so that goes into, okay, they all say they all hit an RPE of eight at the same time. But those elites could

 

Jinger Gottschall  19:44  

hold the eight RPE for significantly longer durations, exactly. Then if you take that result, that theory, that model and extend it to exercise then you have a great rationale for it. why individuals who are elite and professional and have had years and hours of training are able to maintain that higher RPS for a longer period of time.

 

Mac Cassin  20:11  

And it's not clear, it seems like tolerance is something that can be trained. And what I like most about that in terms of RPE, is it essentially means even if you're not hitting your power target, or maybe your heart rate target, as long as you're not overly fatigued, if you're still hitting your RPE, because maybe it's really hot out, maybe you're at elevation, maybe mentally, you're just super drained. As long as you're hitting the RPE you're supposed to for training, you're still getting a training benefit of the workout?

 

Jinger Gottschall  20:34  

Yes, awesome. This actually leads to what we would like you to take away from all this talk about retinal pigment epithelium. I mean,

 

Mac Cassin  20:44  

physic physical education, that's

 

Jinger Gottschall  20:47  

no, okay, rate of perceived exertion. And in addition to the rate of perceived exertion, this post-session rating, it's clearly dependent upon the F Leatt experience, the individual's tolerance, and their training focus. But you can utilize it no matter who you are. It can be an accurate, subjective measure. And you can utilize it in all different types of training both cardio as well as strength.

 

Mac Cassin  21:16  

Yeah. And then the next part for that is there is never a wrong answer for this question of zero to 10. How hard was that? Granted, except for PSR? We might say it's a wrong answer if it's wide right away. And it's a correct answer if it's 20 to 30 minutes later, but that might be a bit pedantic, but usually, you're when you're exercising your initial reaction is going to be correct. As long as you're honest with yourself. That's a big component here, if you're honest with RPE, that's the correct number. And maybe if you're on a bad day, you're on a bad day, and that's fine. Just adjust accordingly. Then when you get into like the post-session rating that value when you record that, like ginger was saying, add-in, maybe some extra notes about okay, maybe this was really extra hard for what the workout was, but maybe it was really hot, or maybe you know, you had a really stressful day at work, or all those different things, just recording those small details about why that value might be inflated or deflated for the work done is going to help you identify patterns and make smarter training choices in the future.

 

Jinger Gottschall  22:13  

Exactly. So the singular bottom line of those two application points is that your post-session rating might actually be the most useful tool that you have the best strategy in terms of training periodization, improving performance, and minimizing injury and overreaching. So really,

 

Mac Cassin  22:33  

even though we have all these awesome gadgets that can measure all sorts of things, the space between your years is still probably your best tool. It can be your worst enemy, but it's probably your best tool.

 

Jinger Gottschall  22:42  

And interestingly, as higher quality as all those gadgets, they're helpful, but also just be honest with that possession rating. Well, that's it for another episode of the knowledge podcast by Wahoo. Today, we hope you got a little bit of post-session reading knowledge and that this will make you a better endurance athlete. Thanks for listening