Is RPE Actually Killing Your Gains? (Response to Athlean-X & Critics)

all right what's going on guys so in this video i want to share some of my recent thoughts about rpe and address five of the most common criticisms i've been hearing lately starting with a recent video from jeff cavaliere of athlean x where he labels rpe as a quote really poor excuse now let me just start by saying that i do think most of us creators here on youtube actually have the same end goal we just want to help people get the best results we can and it's perfectly fine with me if we disagree about some of this stuff in fact i think people learn these concepts better when they're part of an ongoing discussion so rather than just lay out the reasons why i like rpe in this video i'm going to instead focus on addressing some of the counter claims that i've been hearing recently starting with jeff's video now to be clear only the first two criticisms on my list come from jeff's video and then we'll use those as a springboard to address three other common arguments that i've been hearing lately but first just to illustrate what rpe means here are the last few reps on a set of curls taken to an rp of eight on the left meaning i think i could have done two more reps but terminated the set with two reps in the tank and this is what an rp of 10 looks like on the right meaning i couldn't have done another rep with good form even with a gun to my head and the purpose of rpe is simply that to quantify how hard your set was and just like it's useful to know how many sets to do and how many reps to do i think it's equally useful to know how hard to push each set and just as hard as possible or harder than last time isn't good enough in my opinion instead i think rpe or rating of perceived exertion is the best practical tool we have for tracking effort and remember the act of tracking how hard your set was is really no different than the act of tracking how many sets you did or how many reps you did just because you count your reps doesn't mean you do high reps or low reps and it's the same thing with rpe counting rpe doesn't imply you train any less hard it just means you're counting how hard you're training just like everyone else is counting their sets and reps okay so the first criticism of rpe is that it's fine for intermediate and advanced trainees but isn't all that good for beginners and i think this was the main point of the athlean x video and i completely agree with jeff that it's a good tool for intermediate to advanced trainees and in fact it's pretty much ubiquitous in the drug-tested power lifting world at this point so it's utility there is totally clear and uncontroversial but whether or not it's any good for beginners i think is more up for debate now the athlean x argument would be that sense beginners are inexperienced with training they might not really know what an rp9 feels like or an rp8 feels like and so you risk this scenario where they say they're at an rp of eight or nine but they're actually at an rp of three or four and i actually think this concern is understandable in fact one 2017 study found that when subjects were asked to take their typical 10 rep weight to complete failure fully 47 of subjects were able to do 16 or more reps but to me this doesn't mean we should discount our pe as a tool even for beginners it simply shows that most regular gym goers don't push it hard enough on their own but the solution here isn't to say well forget about rpe because beginners can't assess it accurately instead i think beginners just need to learn what an rpe 10 feels like and then from there learn what it feels like to leave one rep in the tank and then learn what it feels like to leave two reps in the tank because it's not like you're just going to wake up someday and all of a sudden you're an intermediate lifter and now all of a sudden you can track rpe correctly if you want to get better at using rpe then you just have to reflect on your set and think about okay how hard was that set really and i see no reason why a beginner shouldn't do that in fact i actually asked dr mike izertel this exact same question a few months ago and he said that even if it is true that beginners can't gauge rpe as accurately it's still not a concern because the intensity threshold for beginners is so much lower to begin with i don't think that's an issue at all who is it an issue for beginners what do beginners not need to progress training remotely close to failure they just don't need it as a matter of fact beginners need to focus on excellent technical execution and just getting incrementally stronger over time and that's done best without training super close to failure only when your technique is really solid do you sort of earn the right or get the most productivity from training closer and closer to failure so if you're a new lifter or you're new to rpe here's what i'd recommend you do i call this an rpe test set so the next time you're doing an exercise that you can fail safely on let's say an incline dumbbell press once you get to a point where you think you could do two more reps call it out say out loud okay i'm at an rp8 now and then actually push it to failure to see if you rated it correctly yeah okay i think that's our key eight yep one more let's go if you could only get two reps that means you're dead on with your rpe but if you got three or four more reps that means you're probably overestimating your rpe and you need to push it harder next time now at this point some people might be thinking okay beginners can use it but is it really necessary for beginners isn't this just overloading them with too much information and i'm gonna get to that criticism in number five at the end okay up next in the same video jeff noted that some people are hiding behind science and i think what he means by this is that some people are using science as an excuse to be lazy some people are so busy trying to fine-tune all the little details that they forget about the basic idea of just pushing yourself and if this is what he means by this then i completely agree but in my opinion the answer here is to again simply remind people that there is an intensity threshold for maximizing muscle growth and it's probably somewhere around an rp of seven maybe eight depending on the exercise and your training experience and if you're not pushing it hard enough then you need to go harder but this doesn't mean we should blame the science science isn't telling you to go any less hard in fact if you look at the literature as a whole science is telling us that many of us probably aren't going hard enough to remember that study from earlier and in fact i would argue that once people actually start paying attention to their rpe their effort tends to increase not decrease and that's because it's quantitatively reminding you that you actually need to be pretty close to failure and you've probably been stopping shy of where you should be more often than not now let me remind you here that going to failure hasn't been shown to be better for muscle growth in the research as a whole anyway for the most part studies find mixed results some studies find failure to be a bit better for growth and some find it to be a bit worse for growth so going all out all the way to failure clearly isn't the key and likely is counterproductive in many instances and this isn't to say it doesn't have any place in training i think it does it just isn't the be-all end-all that some of the anti-rpe folks can imply that it is and that brings me to criticism number three and again arguments three through five aren't coming from athlean x so he's off the hook from here forward and argument number three is that rpe or sometimes just science in general is for [ __ ] it's done by [ __ ] or it's done on [ __ ] and while it's hard to take this as serious criticism i do hear it enough lately that i figured it'd be worth addressing quickly now i know ducette has said this in a video and i've heard ripito say the same basic thing about rpe recently so when you have people in our industry saying this sort of thing it's not surprising that it started to catch on a bit but i'm here to tell you that it's simply not true and i think people who say studies are for [ __ ] or done on [ __ ] frankly haven't read very many studies now i'm not one to argue for hardcore points i just want to know what works best but for one the training protocols used in studies are usually a lot more hardcore than you think just look at this recent study from bjornsson and colleagues out of norway they had national level power lifters do blood flow restriction training to see if it could help with muscle growth and just look at the protocol four sets of front squats with 30 one rep max and the first set and last set were taken to complete failure with blood flow being restricted to the legs this is puke bucket level training and if you're one of those people who's ever said studies are for [ __ ] then i challenge you to do this on your next leg day tell me how it feels and tell me if it changes your mind and i didn't cherry pick this one study either this isn't the one hardcore study i just happened to read it the other day and that's because this type of intensity is actually very common in resistance training studies as researcher chris barakat recently explained most studies simply have all subjects just take every set to failure to standardize intensity as a controlled variable every subject says this is the hardest i've ever trained in my life in the lab like the environment in the lab is you have like six other people in the lab at the same time you're doing the same exercises so now it becomes competitive they always admit especially our lower body studies like they're like i've never trained my legs that hard and it's like yeah well no wonder you're gonna respond pretty well but then some people might say okay the studies are harder than i realized but a lot of them are still carried out on inexperienced lifters so they don't really apply to me but i don't agree with this either because for one a lot of studies like the one i just mentioned do in fact recruit well-trained subjects and for the ones that don't the reality is that most people are still in the beginner to early intermediate stage of training anyway whether they think so or not and in my experience most people overestimate how well-trained they really are so you probably have more in common with the average study subject than you think and also this argument implies that something fundamentally changes with your physiology when you go from beginner to intermediate or from intermediate to advanced but this isn't really true either the main difference is that your rate of progress will slow down but for the most part the same scientific principles of what works for muscle growth applies across the spectrum of lifting experience in fact i would argue that doing studies on beginners is actually a good thing because it allows the research to actually detect an effect if we were only doing studies on pro-natural bodybuilders we're so close to our genetic ceiling that would be really hard for the research to notice any significant difference in a reasonable time frame but if you can find a significant effect in beginners in eight weeks then it's reasonable to assume that you could also see an effect in more advanced trainees it would just take you longer to notice it now i don't expect this to change the mind of anyone who really hates applying science to bodybuilding but for anyone who's undecided maybe this will convince you that science is yet another tool in our toolbox that can be very helpful when applied properly and it doesn't need to be a binary thing either you can listen to what the experience bros and coaches have to say and also pay attention to what the science is saying look at both curiously and skeptically and over time you'll find an approach that works really well for you okay criticism number four is a big one and it's that regardless of training experience rpe isn't very accurate to begin with now i hear this left and right so i won't attribute it to any one person but despite many people saying it it also isn't true the latest research shows that experienced lifters are actually very good at guessing rpe a recent study by susan colleagues had 10 well-trained lifters call it when they thought they were at an rp of six so when they had four reps left and when they thought they were at an rp of nine on the squat bench press and deadlift now on average subjects were only off by one rep with the 6rpe and only off by 0.6 of a rep with rpe9 now generally for bodybuilding people won't be training at rp6 very much anyway so the rp9 result is most relevant and this study tells us that once you have some lifting experience you most likely know when you're at an rp of nine and other data shows that the more you practice this skill the better you get at it okay and criticism number five is that all of this is just too much information and i would say that out of the five arguments i've laid out here this is the one i sympathize with the most now i know some people think that i over complicate training on this channel and maybe i do sometimes but that's just because i genuinely find the details interesting but if i were to go into the gym and train a new lifter for the first time the last thing i'd want to do is bog them down with a bunch of little details and a personal pet peeve of mine is when trainers try to flex their knowledge on their clients rather than just explaining to them what they need to do in basic simple terms but i honestly don't think that rpe falls into this category it's an extremely intuitive concept you just ask the client how many more reps they think they could do and to say that most beginners just couldn't understand a simple one to ten ranking scale is kind of pandering in my opinion so as i see it you just need to assess each individual in terms of what their training iq is and how eager they seem to be to learn this stuff and if they have a low training iq and aren't particularly eager to learn which is fine not everyone's as interested in this stuff as you might be then yeah you might want to keep things as basic and practical as possible and maybe instead of telling them about this fancy term rpe right away you can simply just ask them okay on a scale of one to ten how hard was that set could you have pushed it harder did you push it too hard and let your technique slip and just get them thinking about how hard they're training because after technique how to apply appropriate effort really is one of the most important things to learn in the gym and i think i'm going to leave it there for this one like i said at the beginning i do think that most of us are just trying to get people the best results that we can and if we disagree about some of the methods that's totally okay by me um i hope that you guys found the video helpful if you did don't forget to leave it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you guys all here in the next one the blood just like running i noticed that that's crazy just give me a second here got the guy you want inside oh yeah i mean jeffy it's [ __ ] pink bro pink [ __ ] me

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 599,968

Rating: 4.877851 out of 5

Keywords: jeff cavaliere, athlean x, greg doucette, athlean-x, jeff nippard athlean x, athlean x vs jeff nippard, greg doucette jeff nippard, greg doucette jeff cavaliere, greg doucette athlean x, RPE, jeff nippard RPE, omarisuf, mike israetel, how hard should you train, greg doucette harder than last time, should you train to failure, effective reps, training to failure for muscle growth, how hard should you workout, how to use RPE, hiding behind science, jeff nipard, jeff nippard

Id: AXEONcNhL1E

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020