Hey Friends,

Happy Sunday. Hope everyone had a fun Halloween (and enjoyed some candy!).

This week, I’m going to be touching on workout intensity.

How hard you should be pushing yourself in a workout is a line that is pretty blurry for many people.

If you don’t push the intensity hard enough, you likely won’t see any results or changes in your body.

Push it too hard, though, and you’ll leave your body feeling like it’s running on fumes. Struggles with recovery, aches and pain, increased risk of injury, and burnout can all occur if you push past your limits.

So how much is too much? This week I’ll talk through how to use rating of perceived exertion (RPE) as your guide.

💤 Set a bedtime alarm tonight through Thursday night 💤

I’m having a sleep-related action point this week because it’s a huge factor in your capacity for intensity in your workouts.

Almost everyone sets alarms to wake up. And then they start their day, even if they don’t really feel like it when their alarm goes off.

Getting to bed at a consistent time plays a huge role in the quality of your sleep.

So this week, set an alarm at a consistent time each night. A bedtime alarm.

Then, when your alarm goes off, you go to sleep even if you don’t really feel like it.

Note: this should not be alarm going off, and then you crawl into bed to doom scroll social media. When the alarm sounds, phone is going off, lights are out, and you are actually trying to go to sleep.

Try it for a week. You’ll probably hate it the first day or two, but give it an honest shot.

Before I talk about how to use RPE as your guide for intensity, we need to define what it actually means.

In simple terms, RPE is basically how hard a set of an exercise feels on a scale of 1-10.

1 on the scale means you aren’t really working at all, and 10 means all out/everything you have in the tank.

So, let’s use cardio as a simple example. Walking or warming up would be around a 3 or less. Low intensity cardio (think a 20-minute jog) would be somewhere in the 4-6 range. High-intensity efforts such as sprinting or jogging up a steep incline would be somewhere in the 7+ range.

I use cardio as an example because most people are familiar with what those efforts feel like, so it gives you a good idea of how the scale works.

However, the scale is most useful (in my opinion) as a measure of intensity in how you are lifting weights.

Here is how the scale would work in a set of a weighted movement:

You are using the scale to rate your effort. This is a nuanced system that I’m oversimplifying for this discussion.

But I laid out the scale this way because generally speaking, if you are lower than an RPE of 7 on your weighted sets, you probably aren’t going to be getting stronger or see a ton of change in your body.

An RPE of 7 would mean I did a set of chest presses and stopped the set when I probably could have gotten 3 more reps in.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what RPE is, how do you actually put it into practice to guide your intensity? Here are some general rules of thumb:

When talking about your main compound lifts, I’m talking about things like squats, deadlifts, and chest presses. The exercises that work multiple muscle groups at a time and are the main focus of any given workout.

For ‘accessory work’, I’m referring to things like tricep extensions, bicep curls, and lateral raises. Usually, lifts where you are only working one muscle in isolation would fall into this category.

I say 6-8 here because it should still be a really strong, challenging effort. But probably don’t need to be reaching quite the level of fatigue that you would with your compound lifts.

For average people who are just trying to stay in shape and feel good, going to complete failure at RPE 10 all the time is not necessary to see results.

Being at RPE 10 is where you are more likely to injure yourself or hinder your recovery.

I do, however, think that there is benefit in finding it occasionally.

For example, for me personally, say I have a workout with 6 exercises, doing 3 sets of each. I probably will find RPE 10 on 3/18 of my total sets in that workout. Sometimes, I will take the third set of an exercise to total failure, but will basically never take all 3 sets of an exercise to failure.

I would label myself as an experienced weight lifter. I’ve basically been lifting weights 5 days a week for 7 years, very rarely missing workouts. The point of my saying this is that I am very familiar with my limits and what my body can handle.

I push towards RPE 10 more often than I would recommend to inexperienced or casual weight lifters. Which is why I used the headline “Find RPE 10 Rarely”. Maybe one set in a workout or one set in a week would put you in a good spot.

Up to this point, I have been referring to RPE in the context of the number of reps. If you are doing a set of 8-12 reps, you can easily use RPE to guide your effort just by using the numbers.

However, it is different when you are using timed intervals.

I say this because I work at two different gyms where we do mostly timed working sets. For example, you are working for 40 seconds and then resting, or working for 60 seconds and then resting.

The goal of the movement is to do it for time, not for a certain number of reps. This is the structure for the vast majority of group fitness classes, so I wanted to add it in here.

In general, when you are doing timed intervals with weights, it inherently has more of a muscular endurance focus than a strength focus.

If you have 40 seconds to work, and then only 20 seconds to recover before you go again, it probably doesn’t make sense to find an RPE of 9 or 10, right? You’d be totally gassed and likely wouldn’t be able to make it through the next 40 seconds of work.

So I generally recommend that with timed intervals, you use a lower RPE.

Think back to when I used cardio as an example, and said low intensity efforts (like a 20-minute jog) would fall somewhere in the 4-6 RPE range.

It would be extremely over-generalizing to say that’s where you always should be with timed intervals, but it’s a good guideline for you. That’s the nature of timed training.

With 40 seconds working and 20 seconds recovering, you can’t have all your 40-second working sets be all out; it simply doesn’t work.

But, if you ever take a fitness class with me as your coach, I’m intentional in helping guide people to those higher intensities when the time is appropriate. I know how to help people find it without overdoing it. :)

This week served as an intro to properly gauging your workout intensity. Next week, I’m going to expand on it a bit to help you identify signs if you are doing too much or overtraining, and when you should take your foot off the gas a bit.

Have an awesome week!

Ben

If this stuff is interesting to you, you’d love this YouTube video. Jeff Nippard is one of my favorite, science-backed people in the fitness industry. I specifically thought the 30-second statement starting at 3:20 was a useful takeaway, but this whole video is great.

And finally, here is a useful meal prep to save: