Ask-A-Coach: What is RPE & RIR?

Workouts here at Fitness Together can sometimes come with some technical coaching jargon.

I would like to explain two important yet interchangeable terms/concepts that will have a huge effect on your strength development and overall health, whether you’re working out at home or in the studio. These two concepts are known as Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and Reps in Reserve. Let’s talk about what these mean and how they can be utilized towards your workouts.

RPE and RIR are both describing a similar concept, just from different directions. RPE is on a scale of 1 to 10, broken up into sectors of difficulty. 1 through 3 is generally very light, 4-5 described as moderate, 7 as high effort, 8-9 as very hard and 10 would be considered maximum effort. The reason why we consider RIR as interchangeable is that it just describes how many reps do you think you have left in the tank. RPE9 would be similar to RPE1-2, to give a comparison.

So how do we put this into practice? When you’re working a set of goblet squats, for example, our goal is generally to find a weight that’s challenging but one you could do for two to three more repetitions. We might ask, “how many more reps can you do”, or, “how hard was that?” By moving towards a weight that genuinely pushes us to this more difficult rep, we get a truer expression of your strength and a better understanding of where to move the programming from there. My favorite aspect of this autoregulated system is that we are generally pretty reliable on this self-assessment, whether you’re relatively new to the gym or a ten-year veteran. The next time you’re doing a workout on your own, whether it’s cardio or lifting or some athletics, keep this scale in mind and adjust your effort level accordingly!