25 Years of Session Rating of Perceived Exertion: Historical Perspective and Development

Abstract

The session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) method was developed 25 years ago as a modification of the Borg concept of rating of perceived exertion (RPE), designed to estimate the intensity of an entire training session. It appears to be well accepted as a marker of the internal training load. Early studies demonstrated that sRPE correlated well with objective measures of internal training load, such as the percentage of heart rate reserve and blood lactate concentration. It has been shown to be useful in a wide variety of exercise activities ranging from aerobic to resistance to games. It has also been shown to be useful in populations ranging from patients to elite athletes. The sRPE is a reasonable measure of the average RPE acquired across an exercise session. Originally designed to be acquired ∼30 minutes after a training bout to prevent the terminal elements of an exercise session from unduly influencing the rating, sRPE has been shown to be temporally robust across periods ranging from 1 minute to 14 days following an exercise session. Within the training impulse concept, sRPE, or other indices derived from sRPE, has been shown to be able to account for both positive and negative training outcomes and has contributed to our understanding of how training is periodized to optimize training outcomes and to understand maladaptations such as overtraining syndrome. The sRPE as a method of monitoring training has the advantage of extreme simplicity. While it is not ideal for the precise recording of the details of the external training load, it has large advantages relative to evaluating the internal training load.

Variations of Training Workload in Micro- and Meso-Cycles Based on Position in Elite Young Soccer Players: A Competition Season Study

“…The validity and reliability of this scale have been demonstrated in a previous study to estimate s-RPE ( Malone et al, 2015 ). The question was “How intense was your session?.” The players responded to this question 30 min after the end of training or match session ( Foster et al, 2021 ). Durations of training sessions were measured.…”

Training Load, Heart Rate Variability, Direct Current Potential and Elite Long Jump Performance Prior and during the 2016 Olympic Games

“…Training load data as the product of sRPE (in this paper defined as the rating of perceived exertion for the complete training session by the athlete (Foster et al, 2021)) and session duration (Foster et al, 2001) were collected from both technical (i.e., sprint/jump) and non-technical (i.e., strength/power, corrective or recovery/regeneration) sessions and included competition loads. Alongside the total weekly TL and week-to-week change in TL, the following variables were calculated daily: i) acute TL (7-day average), ii) chronic TL (21-day average); iii) TSB (Allen and Coggan, 2010) and, 2017).…”

“…From this research, the most common internal TL measure was session ratings of perceived exertion (sRPE) which are also recommended as a primary TL intensity measure in team sports and used widely in endurance sports (Drew and Finch, 2016;McLaren et al, 2018;Mujika, 2017). There appears to be a relationship between sRPE-TL (the product of sRPE and session duration) (Foster et al, 2021) and performance in the sprints (Suzuki et al, 2006) where sRPE-TL using Bannister's model predicted performance in an elite Japanese 400-m sprinter. In regards to monitoring tools that can be used with sRPE-TL, the acute-to-chronic workload ratio (Hulin et al, 2014) has been the most popular in many coaching circles, although there seems to be significant statistical concerns with its use (Impellizzeri et al, 2020).…”

Effect of Player Role and Competition Level on Player Demands in Basketball

“…Various methods have been used previously to quantify the movement demands of basketball (e.g., timemotion analysis), and the physiological (e.g., heart rate, blood lactate) and perceptual (e.g., rating of perceived exertion) responses to those demands. Recently, accelerometry has been proposed as a useful tool for quantifying the movement demands of basketball [3]. While extensive research to quantify match demands of basketball has been conducted and reviewed [4], match demands can vary between players on the same team.…”