Bigredbull

More lies in this industry than Pinocchio’s play book.

Question: Why on earth do many supposedly intelligent coaches promote RPE when it fails a basic empirical falsification test?

One only needs one significant piece of evidence to obliterate an entire contention. Even for advanced lifters, the phenomenology of your brilliant point regarding hitting your workout numbers for the day despite feeling like absolute shit still pertains.

This industry which churns out such lies and / ignorance should be more robustly exposed. What’s more worrying is that the training and nutrition mythologies have duped many “experts” - for decades.

Mark Rippetoe

Because it makes them money. It allows them to sell template-type programming that doesn't have to be coached at the individual level. If a coach with, say, 200 clients a month has to handle each client on an individual basis, reviewing every workout and assigning weights for the next workout to each client individually, that coach can't work the 200 clients a month. Hand them a way to assign their own numbers based on how things "feel" and you multiply the potential income from a much bigger client base several fold. That's all there is to it. They know it doesn't work, but it's the money. Some of these people are millionaires because of this, and it is a very viable business model, even if it is not a training model. It's the Planet Fitness of the personal training industry. You lose a few serious clients every month, who figure out that they haven't made any strength progress in a year, but they are easy to replace because the idea is so appealing to inexperienced people. And that's all there is to it.

Bigredbull

There are some “high profile” advanced lifters and coaches out there who promote RPE. I think it’s greedy and dishonourable that they do so for financial gain at the expense of many well-intentioned lifters’ aspirations (from novice to advanced) who seek progress.

More power to Starting Strength for keeping it real.

Andrew Lewis

It also allows the seller to place the onus of effectiveness on the trainee in a way that can never be verified: "the program didn't work. You used RPE wrong."

We too can say "you didn't do the program correctly", but in a verifiable way with objective metrics.

100kilos

Do you have any suggestions for additional modifications to this schedule? My schedule is based on an 8 day week because I’m a firefighter and work 24 hour shifts where the schedule repeats perpetually every 8 days. My training schedule is 1 on, 2 off, 1 on, 1 off, 1 on, 2 off, repeat. I adhere to this schedule because training on the days I’m on duty feels counterproductive seeing as I could be sleep deprived the entirety of the night, hence not recover, and training the days following my shift is difficult due to being sleep deprived. 3 weeks into NLP, 37, 5’11”, 195 pounds, SQ 250, BP 215, DL 315, 4000 calories per day. I will lose 6 weeks training in a year because 365 days/ 8 day weeks = 46 weeks. Thank you.

Example of schedule: 1. Work 2. Off 3. Train 4. Work 5. Off 6. Train 7. Off 8. Train

Mark Rippetoe

As we have told firefighters for many years, you just do what you can. It's not optimal, but that's okay.