Karl Popper pops RPE

[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 re. 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]

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

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.

[AndrewLewis]

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.

[William MG]

The work flow of this program is really quite simple: show up for your workouts, push a bit harder each time and repeat. The simplicity makes it successful for those who apply themselves.

This RPE stuff is too complicated. And regarding "feelings", those are usually deceiving and just lead to trouble. Best to avoid them and just get to work.

[Satch12879]

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.

In other words, it's a cover for the lack of programming knowledge experience of coaches, some of whom you'd think would know better.

[Mark E. Hurling]

Some here might recall the advocates of RPE here all too well. Their assertion that you could assess and scale effort not only 1 through 10 reliably was silly enough. But when more then a few of them started putting fractions and decimals into the whole numbers, well, it got beyond stupid.

[TommyGun]

Shout out to the OP for dropping Popper and RPE in the same sentence. Your question about applying Popper's falsification is a valid one for the ExSci industry. But damn, your word play is top notch. In four words you crushed it. You should write headlines for the a tabloid.

Almost as good as the great NY Post headline" "Headless Man in Topless Bar".

[Jovan Dragisic]

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."

like lockdowns.

[Frank_B]

RPE has always sounded like bullshit. Listening to powerlifters at my old gym talk about it made me roll my eyes, even before I started training.

You cannot honestly tell me that physical stress levels come in discretized packets of 1-10 in integer form. What's the difference between an RPE 7 and 8 if not for the range of infinite numbers in between 7 and 8? What if you only do RPE 7.4567849375448338458 on your RPE 8 day? Has that level of stress sufficiently forced an adaptation?

It's the same problem I have with the pain scale at the doctor's office that are notoriously unreliable. If ever asked, I'm just going to tell them, "My knee hurts. It's e today but the day I hurt it it was definitely tau. It was pi all week until I came to see you."