What Is RPE in Exercise?

When you read workouts on Triathlete, you’ll often see the term RPE, indicating how hard you should be working from the warm-up through to the cool-down. But because this is a subjective metric, it isn’t something you’ll see on your triathlon smartwatch, unless you tell it your RPE post workout. Instead, it’s something you can manually input into your training data based on how you felt.

To guide you in measuring your RPE in exercise, here’s your complete guide to help you measure your training and ensure all sessions aren’t all out or too easy.

RPE meaning​

So what does RPE stand for? RPE – or the Rate of Perceived Exertion – is a scale used to identify the intensity of your exercise based on how hard you feel (or perceive) your effort to be. The RPE scale typically runs from 0 to 10, with zero being literally nothing and 10 being the hardest you could possibly exert yourself.

For example, a 7/10 RPE means you should be at about 7 out of 10 in terms of perceived exertion – or about 70% effort.

One thing to note: RPE is a subjective measure of how hard something feels both physically and mentally for you in that specific workout on that specific day. You might perceive the same effort as harder or easier on a different day for any number of reasons – your fatigue level, illness, weather, even mental fatigue can make a workout feel harder. That’s why RPE is commonly used as just one metric among a number of tools to help fine-tune your training.

Why use RPE?

You’ll see RPE training references in many of our One-Hour Workouts on Wednesday and in other common training plans. While your specific coach might also give you target paces or heart rate zones to hit, RPE provides a more universal scale to measure exercise exertion.

The other benefit of RPE in exercise is that it gives you a check on more objective measures like heart rate or power.

You might have established your training zones with an FTP test or extrapolated them from a long race effort; that then gives you target heart rate zones to hit for various efforts and corresponding power numbers on the bike or paces on the run and in the pool. But there are workouts where you’re hitting the pace, power, or heart rate numbers – and yet your perceived exertion feels off.

Think of those days the tempo workout feels like an all-out sprint! That’s where RPE can come in handy as an additional piece of information to check your intensity.

– Training Zones: Do You Need Them?
– Why Triathletes Should Train in Zone 2
– 3 Heart-Rate Monitor Mistakes That Everyone Makes

The longer you pay attention to your RPE fitness too, the more you’ll fine-tune it. As you hit your paces and numbers in workouts, you’ll also learn what Olympic-distance pace or 70.3 effort feels like. And you’ll learn to listen to your body.

RPE scale

Originally, the RPE scale was established as the Borg RPE Scale and went from 6 to 20. The idea was that if you added a zero to your perceived exertion, you’d get your approximate heart rate. For example, a 12 on that scale would correspond with about 120 heart rate – which is considered “fairly light” activity on the Borg scale, such as brisk walking.

In the 1960s, that scale was changed to an easier to understand 0 to 10, but the rough guidelines are still applicable.

Strava, for instance, uses RPE as a metric you can add to your workouts. Here’s how it defines the RPE scale of 1-10:

• Easy (1-3): Could talk normally, breathing naturally, felt very comfortable
• Moderate (4-6): Could talk in short spurts, breathing more labored, within your comfort zone but working
• Hard (7-9): Could barely talk, breathing heavily, outside your comfort one
• Max effort (10): At your physical limit or past it, gasping for breath, couldn’t talk/could barely remember your name

Spend some time familiarizing yourself with the RPE chart so you can evaluate your effort throughout a workout and then log it appropriately afterward.

How to measure RPE

Your RPE calculation might look a little different depending on which sport you’re participating in. But some key considerations can include:

• Heart rate
• Sweat (though environmental factors influence sweat immensely making it more challenging to measure)
• Breathing
• Rate of muscle fatigue

Muscle fatigue will more heavily influence your RPE during weightlifting while running RPE might have more to do with breathing and heart rate. But regardless of the sport you’re participating in, you should be in tune with all aspects of your body to measure effort.

Should I log my RPE for all workouts?

For the most part, RPE is a guide to help you understand your effort during a workout. But if you want an extra data point to compare after your workout, you can log your RPE within your workout summaries either on paper or in your smartwatch workout summary.

Ultimately, RPE should guide your training effort from one workout to the next to ensure you aren’t doing all training all out or spending too much time at a recovery pace. That way, your training is effective without the risk of overdoing it.

So whether you log your RPE or not, you should go into each workout with a plan for how hard your effort will be and use your rate of perceived exertion as a guide to stay within that effort.