Your athlete showed up Tuesday to the strength session and moved the same weight as always. They moved it, yes, but it cost them twice as much: they slept five hours, traveled over the weekend, ate whatever was around. On the spreadsheet, the session was perfect: every set, every rep, the prescribed weight. In reality, that session cost them far more than you planned, and that difference shows up nowhere. On Thursday you program another hard session because on paper they're doing fine. Paper doesn't know a thing.
What solves that problem isn't more technology. You don't need GPS, lactate, or a heart-rate-variability band. You need two numbers your athlete can give you in thirty seconds at the end of each session, and an organized way to accumulate them. With that, on Monday you stop guessing how the week is going and start deciding how it goes. This article is about how to build that system, and above all, about how not to turn it into a questionnaire nobody fills out.
RPE and RIR: prescribing by feel, not just by weight
RPE (rate of perceived exertion) is the score your athlete gives to how hard something was, on a scale of 0 to 10. RIR (reps in reserve) is RPE's direct cousin applied to strength training: how many reps they had left before technical failure. These are two ways of saying the same thing from the athlete's side, not from the sheet's side.
Prescribing by feel solves a concrete problem: a percentage of 1RM is a snapshot of a good day, and your athlete doesn't show up the same every day. If you ask for 4x5 at 80%, on a day they arrive exhausted that can be an effort close to failure, and on a day they arrive fresh it can fall short. If you ask for 4x5 leaving 2 reps in reserve, the stimulus adjusts itself to how they showed up.
The scale, in plain terms
- RPE 10: couldn't do even one more rep. Failure or the edge of it.
- RPE 9: had one rep left. Hard, but controlled.
- RPE 8: had two left. The zone where most strength work lives.
- RPE 7: had three left. Quality work, clean technique, high velocity.
- RPE 6 or lower: had four or more left. Technical work, easy running, active recovery.
For whole sessions (a class, a run, a metcon) use a single overall 0-to-10 score at the end. That's the one you'll accumulate.
sRPE: the session's load in a single number
Session load, or sRPE, is calculated by multiplying the overall RPE by the duration in minutes. A 60-minute session scored 7 is 420 arbitrary units. A 45-minute one scored 9 is 405. Almost the same load, from two sessions that look completely different on the calendar.
That's what makes the number interesting: it puts things that didn't seem comparable on the same scale. Heavy strength work, a long run, a conditioning class, and a technical session all fall into the same unit. When you add up the week's seven sessions you get the weekly load, and that's where you see what no calendar shows you: how much you actually asked of that person.
Two readings matter more than the number alone. First, the trend: if your athlete had been averaging 2,400 units a week and this week is at 3,600, something changed, even if the plan looks the same. Second, the distribution: two weeks of 3,000 units aren't equivalent if one is spread across four days and the other concentrated into two.
How to teach your athlete to score accurately
A poorly scored RPE is worse than no RPE at all, because it gives you false confidence. The good news is that scoring well can be taught in two or three weeks if you're explicit about it. These are the four points that pay off the most.
- The mistake of scoring everything an 8: it's the most common one. The athlete who wants to look good to you scores everything between 7 and 8 because "it was fine." Break that pattern by asking them to first tell you how many reps they had left, not the RPE number. RIR is harder to fake than a feeling.
- The anchored reference: RPE means nothing if it isn't anchored to a real experience. Define with each athlete which session was their 10 (the hardest one they remember) and which was their 5, and use those two sessions as a reference. Without an anchor, each athlete uses their own scale and the numbers can't be compared, not even against their own numbers from last week.
- Score 20 or 30 minutes afterward: if you ask at minute zero, what they're answering is about the last set, not the session. After half an hour the perception stabilizes and the number represents the full effort.
- Never score in front of the group: in a class, the person who says 9 when the one next to them said 6 will correct their own number. Keep the log individual and private.
What to look at besides RPE, without building a questionnaire
RPE tells you how much it cost. It doesn't tell you why. For that, four more signals are enough, and the rule is that they have to fit in under fifteen seconds per session. The moment your questionnaire takes two minutes, you stop having data.
- Adherence: the most underrated data point. If your athlete did 3 of 5 sessions, the discussion isn't about load, it's about why they missed. Low adherence explains more stalled results than any programming mistake.
- Pain: a 0-to-10 scale and the location. Not to diagnose (that's not your job), but to spot the pattern: pain that always shows up in the same session and the same spot is information, not noise.
- Sleep: hours, a number. No need for perceived quality or anything finer. Hours alone already sort out half the hard conversations.
- Mood or stress: a 1-to-5 scale. The athlete who has been at a 2 for three weeks straight doesn't need more volume, they need you to ask what's going on.
With RPE, duration, and these four signals you have a complete system. Everything else is optional and probably overkill.
Acute and chronic load: useful, debated, and not a traffic light
Here we need to be honest, because the topic was oversold for years. The original idea is simple: you compare the load of the last 7 days (acute) against the average of the last 3 or 4 weeks (chronic). If the ratio spikes, your athlete is doing a lot more than their body has gotten used to.
For a while it circulated as if it were a hard rule, with a precisely marked "safe zone" and "risk zone." That version doesn't hold up. The most cited methodological critique, led by Impellizzeri and colleagues, points out that the famous risk curve came from grouping continuous data into arbitrary categories, that there's a mathematical coupling problem (acute load is contained within chronic load), and that replacing chronic loads with random values produces similar results. On the other side, there are researchers who argue that monitoring with simple tools like this one shouldn't be abandoned, and that what's missing is better defining the parameters and time windows: you can read a balanced synthesis of that debate in the editorial by Zouhal and colleagues (2021).
Translated to your week: the relationship between what an athlete did this week and what they'd been doing is a data point worth looking at, not a verdict. Don't use it as a traffic light that tells you who to hold back. Use it for what it actually is: a trigger that points you to which athlete to call today.
The number doesn't decide anything. The number tells you who you need to talk to before the week decides it for you.
The three decisions you make on Monday
This whole system exists for a fifteen-minute meeting with yourself, Monday morning, looking at the week that just passed. From there, three possible decisions come out per athlete, and no more than that.
- Keep: the accumulated load is in line with previous weeks, adherence was high, pain is stable. Don't touch anything. Most Mondays this is the answer, and sticking with it is also a decision.
- Cut volume: the load jumped hard, or sleep has been bad, or two sessions in a row came in scored 9 when they were programmed as 7. Remove sets, not intensity. Keeping the quality of the stimulus and lowering the amount preserves the adaptation and takes pressure off the week.
- Move the hard session to a different day: sometimes the problem isn't the total load but where it landed. If the demanding session fell right on the day your athlete sleeps less or works a twelve-hour shift, moving it to Thursday fixes more than cutting it would.
Why this sets you apart and how you sell it
Most coaches adjust the week. The difference is whether they can explain why. When you tell your athlete "this week I'm cutting two sets from the leg block," it sounds like improvisation. When you tell them "we'd been at 2,400 load units a week, this week you were at 3,500, and you scored the last two sessions a 9 when they were programmed at 7: I'm cutting two sets and we're moving the hard one to Thursday," that no longer sounds like improvisation. It sounds like someone's at the wheel.
That explanation is exactly what your client perceives as professionalism, and it's what justifies your price against a generic plan downloaded for free. You're not selling exercises: exercises are on the internet. You're selling the judgment to change the plan when real life interferes, and the ability to show it. Use it concretely in your sales pitch: tell people you do a weekly load review per athlete and that every adjustment comes with its reason. It's a verifiable claim, not a promise.
For this to work, the logging needs to be part of the session, not an extra chore. In ATHRIX your athlete logs the RPE and the weights used for each exercise from their phone, in the moment, without leaving the workout you assigned them; and you see the week's accumulation and how their numbers are progressing without having to ask for anything or cross-check spreadsheets. That turns Monday's fifteen minutes into something you actually do every week, which is the only way a load-management system is worth anything.
Conclusion
Load management by RPE isn't technology, it's a habit. Two numbers per session, four context signals, and a weekly review are enough to go from programming blind to programming with a clear picture of how your athlete showed up. You don't need more than that, and adding more usually makes the system worse because it lowers adherence to the logging.
Start small: pick three athletes, ask them for RPE and duration for four weeks, and on the fifth Monday you'll have a baseline to compare against. From there, every decision you make stops being a hunch and becomes a reading you can explain out loud. That ability to explain the why is, in practice, what separates a coach who improvises from one who runs a process.