Why Rate of Perceived Exertion(RPE) should be tracked and monitored?

Since the late 1950s, the concept of RPE in sport and exercise science has been growing in importance. It has been defined as the conscious sensation of how hard and strenuous a specific physical activity was from a player perspective. Its neurophysiological bases are poorly understood despite its importance and usefulness to monitor and identify exercise intensity

The RPE scale is used to measure the intensity of your exercise. The RPE scale runs from 0 – 10. The numbers below relate to phrases used to rate how easy or difficult you find an activity, For example, 0 (nothing at all) would be how you feel when sitting in a chair; 10 (very, very heavy) is how you feel at the end of an exercise stress test or after a very difficult activity. The athlete should be asked after each workout what their RPE is. This single number provided retrospectively by the athlete, refers to the mean intensity of the entire exercise session.

The use of the RPE scale is growing in popularity in team sports because the data collection is easy and it accurately assesses the internal load placed on an athlete during a training session. It helps many teams base training off of player’s RPE and Workload. In many cases, it has been found that starters are required to do the same amount of training as bench players with significantly less workload. Now with workload index and RPE this is being corrected.

RPE is important when planning future training sessions. We know the basic training variables to increase or decrease load using the FIT principle. The intensity of the workout is the major factor when deciding how each and every exercise will look. This is the common intensity difference between matches and training.