6 Months deep, feeling a little lost, feeling a little fat.

[Mark Rippetoe]

My main point was that just because the bar feels heavy or moves slow doesn't automatically make it an RPE 10

And thus, my assessment of RPE. Thanks for the clarification.

[Robert Santana]

B-b-but muh ABS?!

They will still be there. No one sees them anyways, you aren't walking around in public naked are you?

[Robert Santana]

Yeah I definitely should have phrased that part much more carefully. To clarify, I'm sure Will's "very, very heavy" 275 felt a different kind of heavy than his 475 (perhaps that was very, very, very, very heavy). I'm also sure he would be able to Perceive the difference between the two heavy Exertions and with that be able to relatively accurately estimate how many more reps he could do of each.

My main point was that just because the bar feels heavy or moves slow doesn't automatically make it an RPE 10



This is a very good question. Yes, you certainly can (to varying degrees) perceive exertion visually - but you cannot reliably rate it (on the RPE scale) visually. The only exception would be a coach who knows that particular lifter very well.

Which is back to my main point: RPE 10 can appear very different on different lifters.

Visual is much more reliable than perceiving a feeling. Every deadlift after 400 more or less feels the same to me. In fact, my 315 triple on my warm ups has felt like shit since my 1RM was 440. It's closer to 540 now and guess what? 315 x 3 still feels like dog shit. Every rack pull after 455 also feels the same. Deadlifts and pin variants are the best illustrations of this because anything heavy that includes an isometric component is god awful for a good 100 lb spread. A heavy set of 5 rack pulls feels like 5 1RMs with no rest in between. If you followed RPE you'd never rack pull heavy, which probably partially explains why so many lifters tell me they don't make progress on them.