EP50, RPE Explained, Why "RPE 8" Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does

Most people use RPE incorrectly, and the worst part is that they don't know it. In this episode, Matt breaks down Rate of Perceived Exertion from the ground up: what it actually means, why it beats percentage-based training, and the one misconception that could be making you train way heavier or way lighter than you think.

If a coach told you to hit RPE 8 today, would you know what that feels like? Most people think RPE 8 equals 80% of their one-rep max. That's only true in one specific case. Matt explains the real math, what RPE looks like across strength, running, and Olympic lifting, and how to calibrate yourself so you actually trust the number you're writing down.

Questions this episode answers:

• What does RPE mean in weightlifting and fitness?
• Is RPE 8 the same as 80% of my one-rep max?
• How do I use RPE if I don't know my one-rep max?
• What's the difference between RPE and reps in reserve (RIR)?
• How do I rate effort on a run if I'm not using a heart rate monitor?
• Why doesn't traditional RPE work well for snatches and clean and jerks?
• What's the talk test, and how does it tie to RPE?
• How do I know if I'm actually hitting my target RPE or sandbagging?
• Why does the same weight feel harder some days than others?
• Should I train to failure or stop short?

In this episode, we deep dive into:

• Why Your One-Rep Max Isn't Fixed: And how RPE solves the moving target most percentage-based programs ignore.
• The 1-10 Scale, Decoded: What each number actually feels like, from "barely moving" to "everything you've got."
• The 80% Myth: Why RPE 8 is 92% for a single, 80% for a set of five, and 70% for a set of ten. The chart that fixes one of the most common misconceptions in strength training.
• RPE for Runners: The talk test, the 80/20 rule, and why most people run their easy days too hard and their hard days too easy.
• Why Olympic Lifting Breaks Traditional RPE: What "stay snappy" actually means and why the snatch and clean and jerk need a different framework.
• The Two Ego Traps: Sandbagging vs. underselling, and why honest RPE is the only RPE that works.
• Daily Modifiers: How sleep, stress, and life chaos change your real RPE, and why that's a feature, not a bug.
• The Calibration Test: The single best exercise to learn the scale fast, in one workout.

Unstoppable Challenge: Pick one workout this week. Rate every working set or every running interval with an RPE number. Don't change anything else, just start paying attention. Then next week, run the Calibration Test on one of your lifts.

Get the RPE Field Guide: Subscribed to the podcast through our email list? The RPE Field Guide is hitting your inbox this week. It includes the full scale, the percentage chart, the calibration test, and a quick reference for strength, running, and Olympic lifting.

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UBC RAFFLE: Subscribe to the podcast to be entered into our next raffle, drawing on June 6th. We're giving away a full seat in the Ultimate Bootcamp Challenge ($199 value). One of our most popular programs.

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Transcript

Welcome And The RPE 8 Myth

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Let's go. Welcome to Unstoppable by Design, where we talk all things fitness, mindset, and what it truly means to be unstoppable inside and outside the gym. Quick question. If your coach told you to hit RPE 8 today, would you actually know what that means? And here's the kicker. If you think RPE 8 is 80% effort all the time, you're wrong. I'm going to prove it to you in about five minutes. So today we're going real deep dive on RPE, rate of perceived exertion, what it is, how it works differently for strength, running, and Olympic lifting. And the biggest myth about it that I want to clear up because it could be making you train way heavier or way lighter than you think you are. And stick with me to the end because we put together a RPE field guide that breaks all of this down on paper. And I'm telling you where to grab it before we wrap up. So let's get into it.

The RPE Scale In Plain English

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So RPE stands for rate of perceived exertion. It's a real simple. On a scale of one to ten, how hard did that set feel? How hard did that run feel? Or how hard did that workout feel? One is barely moving, ten is everything you've got, and that's it. But here's why it matters. Most training programs are built on percentages. Hit 80% of your one rep max for sets of five, or 70% for sets of eight. That math works great on paper. The problem is your one rep max is not a fixed number. It moves every single day. Bad sleep, your max drops. Stressful week at work, your max drops. Big meal, light meal, fights, all of it shows up on the bar. So if your program says hit 80% today, but today your real max is 10% lower than the day you tested it, you're not actually lifting 80%, you're lifting 90%. And that's how people get hurt, or grind themselves into the ground, or just flat out plateau. RPE solves this. Instead of locking you to a fixed weight, it asks you to listen to your body that day. It's auto-regulation. You adjust to where you actually are, not where the spreadsheet thinks you should be. A quick walkthrough on the scales, and I'll keep this simple. RPE 1 through 3, you're basically not working. It's a warm-up, it's a walk to the mailbox, that kind of thing. RPE four through six, you're moving, but you could hold the conversation no problem. This is your easy work, your recovery work, your warm-up sets. RPE 7 is where things start to feel real. You've got about three reps left in the tank if it's a strength set, or you're breathing hard, but you can still answer a question if someone asked. RPE 8 means there's about two reps left in the tank. You can talk in short sentences. This is where most of your hard training should live. RPE 9 means there's about one rep left. You're not talking right now, you're focused. And RPE 10, that's it. Nothing left. You finish the set and you literally could not do one more rep. That's the scale. Same numbers across the board, but how they show up changes depending on what you're doing. So let's break that down. In the strength world, RPE is built on something called reps in reserve or R-I-R. That's

Strength Training With Reps In Reserve

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just a fancy way of saying how many more reps you could have done before your form broke down. RPE eight means two reps left. RPE 9 means one rep left. RPE 10 means zero. The sweet spot for most strength work is RPE 7 to 8. You're working hard, you're getting strong, but you're not grinding to failure every set. Failure trashes your recovery. RPE 8 builds strength, you can actually repeat next week. Here's the deal though. Most people lie to themselves about this. They'll do a set, rack the bar, say, yeah, that was an eight. When really they had four reps left. It's just hard to gauge until you've practiced it. We'll come back to how to fix that in a minute. Now, here's the teaching moment I really want to land. This is the part where I tell you something that's probably going to change how you read your training program. People will say RPE 8 equals 80% of your one rep max. It's wrong, or really it's only right in one specific case. It's not right all of the time. RPE is based on reps in reserved, not a fixed percentage, so the percentage changes depending on how many reps you're doing. So talking about real numbers, an RPE 8 single, meaning one heavy rep with two more in the tank, that's actually about 92%

Why RPE 8 Is Not 80%

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of your one rep max, not 80. An RPE 8 sets of 3 is about 87%. And an RPE 8 for a set of 5 is about 80%. That's where the shortcut came from. If you're doing sets of five, RPE 8 does land near 80%, and I think it just kind of carried over into everything else. But an RPE 8 set of 10, that's only 70% of your max, way lighter than 80%. So the percentage moves with the reps. That's actually the whole point of RPE. It scales to what you're doing. An 80% load for a single day is a totally different stimulus than an 80% load for 10 reps. RPE matches the effort to the goal. Why does this matter for you? If you're walking into a heavy day with sets of one or two, thinking RPE 8, that's 80%, no big deal. You're about to lift something way heavier than you bargained for. And if you're doing high rep work thinking the same thing, you're probably leaving some gains on the table because you're going too light. The fix is simple. Stop translating RPE to a percentage, just go by feel and reps in reserve. RPE is a tool, the percentage chart is a backup. Now,

Running RPE Using The Talk Test

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RPE for running is a different animal. It's the same one to ten scale, but instead of reps in reserve, you're listening to your breathing. This is sometimes called the talk test, and it's the easiest way to learn RPE if you've never used it. RPE 3-4, you can hold a full conversation, easy pace. This is zone two, the kind of running where you build your aerobic engine. And here's the key point. Most of your running should live here, like 80% of it. Most people run their easy days too hard and their hard days too easy. RPE kind of fixes that. RPE five to six, you can still talk, but in shorter chunks, you're breathing harder and this is steady state work. RPE 7 to 8 is short sentences only, two or three words and you have to breathe. This is your tempo and your threshold work. RPE 9 to 10, you're not talking at all. You couldn't if you wanted to. This is your sprint work, your finishing kicks, your one mile time trial. If you can't hear your own breathing, you're probably going a little bit too easy or easier. If you can't say your name out loud, you're going too hard for an easy day. That's the whole framework. Now let's talk about RPE for Olympic lifting. Olympic lifting is snatches, cleans, jerks. This is where RPE gets a little different, and I want to be honest about it because most resources kind of skip this part. The traditional RPE scale doesn't really work for Olympic lifts. With a back squat or bench press, if

Olympic Lifting And Technical RPE

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the weight is at RPE 7, you can pretty reliably grind out three more reps. The lift is mostly about strength. But with a snatch or a clean, you can miss a lift that should have been easy because your timing was off, or your bar path drifted, or your feet didn't land right. And you can also nail a lift that should have been crazy hard because everything clicked. The technical piece is so big that strength isn't the only variable. So in the OLI world, RPE is more about how dialed in you have to be mentally. A snatch at 70% of your max feels chill. A snatch at 90% of your max requires you to lock in. Pace, breathe, visualize. Same physical demand on the muscles, way different psychological demand. If you're doing the lifts in a class setting, the practical rule is this most of your skill and technique work should stay in the RPE 6 to 7 range. You want the bar to move well. Heavy attempts at RPE 9 and 10 should be limited because the technical breakdown at those weights is real, and that's where injuries happen. If you ever hear me or a coach say, stay snappy, that's an RPE cue. We're telling you to keep the weight at a level where the bar still moves fast and clean. Now, two pitfalls I want you to watch out for. Number one, the ego trap. This goes both ways. Some people sandbag their RPE, meaning they call something an eight when it was really a ten because they don't want to admit they were close to failure. Other people undersell, calling something a seven

Ego Traps And Daily Modifiers

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to look strong. Both are bad. Both screw up your training because you're lying to yourself about what's actually happening. The fix is just be honest. RPE is a tool for you, not for anyone else watching. The only person who benefits from an accurate RPE is the person reading the number, which is you. Number two, daily modifiers. Your RPE shifts every day. Could be bad sleep, hard week, your kids were up all night, you skip breakfast, you had a stressful meeting before class. All of it changes what RPE feels like. A weight that was an RPE 7 on Monday might be an RPE 9 on Friday. This is a great thing. This isn't a bug. It's the whole point of RPE, and it's that it adapts. If you walk into a gym and the weight that should feel easy is crushing you that day, that's your body telling you to back off. Listen to it. The smart play is to drop the weight and hit your target RPE, not just push through and hit your target weight while feeling like garbage. So let's talk about calibration. Here's the one practical thing I want you to walk away with. Most people are bad at RPE because they've never tested themselves. So here's the test. Pick a working set, any lift. Let's say you're squatting and you're aiming for an RPE 8, meaning two reps left in the tank.

The Calibration Test To Get Accurate

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Do the set, rack the bar, write down what you thought the RPE was, then rest three to five minutes, same weight, same lift, go again, but this time take it as far as you can with good form. Count the reps. If you got two more reps, you called it perfectly. You really did have two left in the tank. If you got four more reps, you sandbacked, and that was really an RPE six. If you got one rep, you went too hard, that was actually an RPE 9. Do this once or twice a month, and your RPE accuracy will get sharp fast. This is the single best thing you can do to actually learn the scale. Now, I know I just threw a lot at you, so here's the good news. We made an RPE field guide. It's a PDF that breaks down the scale across strength, running, and Olympic lifting, includes the percentage chart that we talked about, the calibration test, and a quick reference you can keep on your phone or printout. If you're subscribed to the podcast through our email list, the guide's going to be hitting your inbox this week. If you're not on the email list, jump on, support the show for as little as $3 a month. Your unstoppable challenge for this week is pick one workout, just one, and try to rate every working set or every running interval with an RPE number. Don't change anything else. Just start paying attention.

Field Guide Challenge Raffle And Subscribe

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That awareness alone will make you a smarter trainee. Then next week, run the calibration test on one of your lifts. Before we wrap up, we're running our next raffle drawing on June 6th. This one is a big one. We're giving away a full seat in the Ultimate Boot Camp Challenge, $199 value. This is one of our most popular programs, and somebody listening is going to snag that seat. So to enter, all you've got to do is subscribe to the podcast. That's it. Subscribe wherever you're listening right now and you're in. If the show has helped you, do me a favor, share it with someone who would get something out of it. That's how we grow this thing. Until next time, be well, be unstoppable.