RPE in one paragraph
Rate of perceived exertion is a 1 to 10 scale for how hard a set was. A 10 is a true max effort with nothing left, a 9 means one more rep was there, an 8 means two. Most coaches think of it as reps in reserve turned inside out. It lets you prescribe effort instead of a fixed percentage, which matters when a client’s day, sleep and stress move their strength around by more than a percentage chart admits.
The problem is not the scale, it is the paperwork
In person, RPE is easy: you watch the bar speed, you ask, you adjust the next set. With a client who trains alone three days a week, the number has to survive a trip through a notes app, a text, or a spreadsheet, and then you have to read it before you write next week. Most of the time it doesn’t survive, and the next program is written from a guess and a memory.
How logging works in Spotter
- You assign the session. The client gets it in the app they already have installed on their phone. Nothing is sent until you assign it.
- They log each set: load, reps and RPE. The next set is prefilled from the last one, so the common case is two taps.
- They finish, and the session is marked complete on your side. The logs are on your dashboard the next time you look.
- You can log too. A session you coached in person is logged by you from the same player and badged as trainer-logged. Clients can also log a solo workout from the library on a day you did not program.
Where the numbers go next
When Spotter drafts the following week, every lift carries a “Last:” line with the load, reps and RPE the client actually recorded. Progression follows the rules in your programming profile, not a generic algorithm: if your rule is “add a rep until the top of the range, then add load”, that is what the draft proposes. An RPE of 9.5 on what should have been an 8 shows up on the line, and the draft holds or backs off the way you would. You still see and approve every change. The fuller picture is on adaptive workout programming.
Teaching a client to rate RPE honestly
Software cannot make a client’s numbers true. A few things that help, from trainers who have done it:
- Anchor it once in person. Take a client to a real 9 on a safe lift and name it. Every later rating is relative to that day.
- Tie it to bar speed. “If the last rep slowed down a lot, that was a 9.” Clients can feel speed more reliably than they can count reps in reserve.
- Expect drift. New clients rate everything a 6 or everything a 9. Do not correct every set; watch the trend over two weeks and talk about it in the message thread.
- Rate the set, not the day. A rough day should show up as higher RPE at the same load, which is exactly the signal the next draft needs.
What Spotter will not do with RPE. It will not send a deload, cut a session short, or message the client about a bad week on its own. It shows you the numbers and proposes the next draft. The response is yours, in your words, from the same app.
If you don’t use RPE
You do not have to. Load and reps are logged the same way, and progression rules that run on reps and load work without the third number. RPE is there for the trainers who program by effort, and it is free to ignore for the ones who do not.