RPE & Autoregulation: Smart Tools for Strength Gains Over 40

Podcast – Steph Gaudreau

I get a lot of messages about RPE, Reps in Reserve, and Autoregulation. These are powerful tools, that when practiced, can help you as you implement a long-term strength training program, especially as a woman over 40. However, it takes understanding the pieces that go into these tools, and a well-rounded program, to really make the most of their benefits.

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Key Takeaways

If You Are Looking for Trainings Tools, You Should:

1. Use autoregulation as a way to adjust your training plan and allow for more flexibility
2. Remember that you do not have to be perfect or give your all to have a successful training session.
3. Collect your own data about yourself and what your body needs throughout your life changes

Learning about Yourself through Strength

Having a performance-forward approach when it comes to your workout intensity is great, but it can leave space for injury or overuse. Using the scales of RPE and Reps in Reserve, you can allow yourself a moment to check in and make adjustments to the structure of your program.

While working with a coach is great, learning how to observe your body and what it needs is something that you can do yourself. These tools will help you understand your body in a way that will encourage sustainability and longevity in your strength training program.

It’s All About Flexibility

A good strength training program leaves room for both structure and flexibility. Learning how to adjust your intensity not only helps you learn more about your body, but it can help you tackle those low-energy days without completely giving up and potentially taking a long break.

Autoregulation will keep you moving forward with your program even on lower energy days, which can happen especially as we adjust to new demands on our lives and our bodies. Adjusting the plan based on Autoregulation will help you continue to show up and do your best, while also meeting yourself where you are at.

Are you ready to adjust your effort in order to gain more sustainability and effectiveness in your program? Share your thoughts on this episode with me in the comments below.

In This Episode

• Understand the guiding principles of a well-rounded training program (4:35)
• Learn exactly what RPE and Reps In Reserve are (11:40)
• Why these tools are so useful for women, especially as they age past 40 (16:06)
• What is autoregulation and why it is a useful tool for your workouts (17:51)
• Benefits of RPE and Reps in Reserve for women over 40 (28:02)
• Simple ways you can learn to make the gauges necessary for autoregulation and more (33:31)

Quotes

“The value of using something like RPE is that it helps to tailor your workout intensity to match your daily energy level, your daily bandwidth, how much capacity you have today.” (15:01)

“This isn’t a proprietary way for women over 40 to manage their own strength training. However, it is a validated tool that we can use because it is contextually allowing us more flexibility within the structure of a program.” (16:25)

“This is all part of the tapestry of your own unique autoregulation and recovery and getting to know yourself over time.” (20:47)

“There is structure, but there is also flexibility. And I think that is a really key take-home message and take-home point of this particular podcast.” (25:50)

“We have to keep training if we want to continue to either maintain or see gains over time.” (30:43)

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Related Episodes

FYS 434: Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger

RPE & Autoregulation: Smart Tools for Strength Gains Over 40 Transcript

Steph Gaudreau

What is RPE, rate of perceived exertion, and why is it such a helpful tool for women over 40, in particular, to build strength and muscle in their lifting programs? We’re going to be answering those questions and more on this episode of the podcast.

If you’re an athletic 40-something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself, and doing hard shit, the Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you. You’ll learn how to eat, train and recover smarter, so you build strength and muscle, have more energy, and perform better in and out of the gym.

I’m strength nutrition strategist and weight-lifting coach. Steph Gaudreau, the Fuel Your Strength podcast dives into evidence-based strategies for nutrition, training, and recovery and why, once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and let’s go.

Welcome back. I’m so glad that you’re with me this week. Thanks for tuning in to Fuel Your Strength. I’m so excited that we’re going to be learning about this topic together, because, frankly, I get a ton of questions about, what is RPE? What does it even mean? What is auto-regulation? Why is it useful? How do we do it? And so much more that I figured it was high time we got into it on an episode of the show.

If you’re liking the podcast and you haven’t yet hit the subscribe button on your favorite platform, please do me a favor and hit subscribe. If you’re listening or watching over on YouTube, hit subscribe there and ring the bell for more notifications so you get notified about new episodes of the podcast.

Okay, so on this show, I want to get into what is RPE and its sister scale reps and reserve and also, what is auto regulation. Why are these things helpful in training for strength and or muscle growth? Also, why is it particularly helpful if you are a woman over 40 who is trying to implement a long-term progressive strength training program? And why do I use this for my lifters in the Strong With Steph program? Last time on the podcast, we went into progressive overload in quite a lot of detail.

So if you don’t know what progressive overload is, or you’ve kind of heard about it, but you’re not quite sure. Then jump back to that episode and check that out first. And this is one in a series of episodes that I’m doing, really diving into the rationale behind the type of program that I’ve created with Strong With Steph. Why are the pieces there that are there? Why is this type of training useful, particularly for us as we’re over 40? And another way of looking at that is, why can’t we skip this kind of training as we’re getting older?

I’m 45 at the time of this recording of this podcast. I’ve been lifting myself for almost 15 years, and believe me, yeah, things have changed. Things are different now that I’m in my 40s, and I’m sure will continue to change. But how can we use concepts like rate of perceived assertion, reps and reserve, and auto-regulation to help us if we are in this chapter of life and we’re like, Hey, I know I need to build strength and the time is now. The best time was maybe 10 or 20 years ago to get started, but the next best time is literally today.

There’s not going to be a better time, so you’re not late to the game. You’re not too far behind. The most important thing is that you get started before we really dive in here today. Get a free sample of Strong With Steph. This is a seven-day sample of the program, along with a 20-page Strength Training Guide. If you are a woman over 48 you’re athletic, you want to build that strength and muscle, and you can snag that by going to stephgaudreau.com/workout and we’ll make sure we put that in the description box here on YouTube as well.

All right, so Strong With Steph is my 12 month progressive strength training program that is designed for women over 40 is purpose built for us. And I’m really breaking down what are the different things I’ve included in this program and why. I want you to understand the pieces that go into a well rounded strength training program or a well rounded program if you are in this phase of life now, like I said last time, we talked about progressive overload. Here are the other guiding principles of the program before we get into the meat and potatoes of today with RPE reps and reserve and auto regulation.

So the program that I’ve created is guided by things like smart programming, okay, science-backed, evidence-based, principles we’ve again explored, uh. On the last episode, all about progressive overload, we take a performance-forward approach, so form is going to follow function. Of course, we need to be able to move well and have a solid foundation underneath us for the long haul. You know, this isn’t a quick fix. This is a 12 month program, and there’s actually a year two beyond that. So we know that good things are going to take time, and that’s the number one priority is, is performance and function.

Now, of course, we’re going to build some muscle too, but it’s not a solely esthetics-based program. Another principle that guides the program is progress, not perfection. And again, I said this in the last episode. Over 12 months, you’re gonna miss sessions in the gym. Life is gonna get lifey. We’re just in that phase, chapter of life. So can we aim for something like 70 to 80% consistency and see progress over time, still without falling into all or nothing, thinking and completely abandoning the program? That’s going to become even more important as life does what life does and comes at you 100 miles an hour.

Another guiding principle is structured flexibility. This is so important we know that structure is going to help us to put into practice behavior-based changes with our fitness because that helps us to create routine schedules. It really helps us to remain consistent in the big picture. But we also need flexibility. We can’t have too much rigidity, especially once you’re in that perimenopause transition.

Maybe you’re postmenopausal, you’re just in midlife, and things are unpredictable, so random workouts. Look, if you’re trying to get moving, and I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, you’re just trying to get started, random workouts or kind of making things up on the fly is totally fine, but most people listening to this show are past that point and are looking for something that’s more structured. But if it’s too rigid, then what happens if you’re having a day where you’re not hitting 90% of your one rep max?

What if you don’t even know what your one rep max is yet, because you’re a bit newer to lifting, so these are just some of the questions that oftentimes come up, and that’s why I’ve really created the program with a lot of flexibility baked-in because this time of life can just be a little bit more unpredictable. So it’s important that we kind of merge the best of structure, periodization, progressive overload, with things like choice, autonomy, auto regulation, RPE, reps and reserve and the things that we’re going to talk about on this episode. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more context into why I’m bringing this up on this show.

So let’s go ahead and dive into Rate of Perceived Exertion/ Reps and Reserve, they’re kind of, as I mentioned, sister scales, or complimentary scales. We’ll talk about that, and also auto-regulation and why these things are so important. Now I want to tell you a story about Joan. Joan came in to work in the Strong With Steph program. So she signed up, and she relayed a story to me after the first few months, and she said, you know, prior to this, I was on a strength training program that was using progressive overload.

However, it was a percentage-based program, and I started to really struggle on a lot of days to keep up. I started noticing my sleep was a lot rougher. I was having hot flashes during the night. I was waking up a lot, so I wasn’t waking up feeling as rested, and that was affecting how hard I could push when I was in the gym. And it became so challenging, you know, she would pull up the program and say, Okay, here’s your percentages for the day. And some days, she just didn’t have it in her physically to actually meet those percentages, and she started to feel kind of bad about not being able to hit those percentages, and ultimately was starting to fall behind, or as she perceived to fall behind on the program, and ultimately quit the program because it just became too much of a gap between what was written out and what she actually had the capacity for.

And then when she came into Strong With Steph and saw that we worked with the RPE scale, really found it a little challenging at first. And I’ll talk about sort of pros and cons of RPE here in a moment. But ultimately, after a few months, I was thinking (and related to me) the story of, wow, now I wake up, I can assess how I feel when I get into the gym. I can make those adjustments while I’m there and ultimately not feel bad or guilty or like I’m falling behind or I’m not meeting up to the standard, and that has increased my consistency so much above where it used to be when I was following a pretty strict, rigid percentage based lifting program.

Now I want to say this much, I have followed plenty of percentage-based lifting programs in the past. I spent a ton of time and the Olympic weightlifting gym and was working off percentage-based programs for years. Also would see that quite a bit in my earlier CrossFit days, were working on strength work, for example. Or we were just doing something like cleans, power cleans, again, Olympic lifting, dead-lifting, and so on and so forth and so oftentimes we would see percentages listed out. So I’m no stranger to them. They’re not bad by any means.

However, again, like I said, depending on what phase of life you’re in, what season you’re in, what your goals are, it can be a challenge in midlife, when you are feeling less energy, you’re not sleeping as well, you have a lot of competing priorities going on, and your capacity for really pushing it as hard in the gym is declining. Maybe you’re just not able to meet those percentages at all. So again, nothing bad about it. If you’re on a percentage based program, and it’s working well for you, keep going, you know.

But I want you to know that you do have options before we dive in. If you listen to this episode and you’re like, Okay, I am ready to get to work. I want to take my strength, muscle, energy and performance and take it up a notch. I want to take it to that next level. I want to feel like a badass, but at the same time, do it in a way that works with my physiology as an athletic woman over 40 with coaching and community support. Then go ahead and check out Strength Nutrition Unlocked. This is my group program.

We’re going to lay out the framework for you and guide you as you implement and really customize it to all the things that you’re doing, your preferences, your likes and the the places you want to go with it. Then go ahead and get on board. You can start your process by submitting an [e-mail] slash apply. We would love to hear from you and see you inside the program.

So let’s talk about what our RPE and Reps and Reserve now that I’ve referred to them many times, all right, so RPE is Rate of Perceived Exertion. The simplest way to describe this is that it’s a subjective measurement of your workout’s intensity on a scale from one to 10, one being low and ten being maximum. You can think of a one is kind of your easiest effort, and a 10 is all out effort now, RPE, rate of perceived desertion originally comes from a scale that was really used for more cardio-based efforts, right?

And so now that scale has been adapted, and it is it has been studied. It is validated in strength training. So that’s really exciting. Reps in Reserve is, again, a sister or complementary scale to RPE, and I know there are lots of R’s floating around here. So Reps in Reserve, reserve means how much is left over, so how many reps are left over in the tank on a particular set. So again, this estimates how many more reps you could perform before you reach failure. And so those numbers, whether you’re working in RPE or Reps in Reserve, are based off of 10, and they’re kind of mirror opposites.

So if you had something that was an RPE of eight, that’s a pretty intense effort, but not to failure, then that would mean you have two reps left in reserve, two reps in the tank, because eight plus two is 10. So you can use either of those to gauge your intensity. Another example, let’s say you’re doing warm-up sets, and you’re kind of working off of that RPE or reps, sorry, a rate of perceived exertion of five. So that would be, you know, a warm-up effort, more or less.

It’s not nothing, but it’s also not the most intense that you could do. RPE of five is largely considered to be kind of a warm-up set. That would mean you have five reps in reserve, five plus five equals 10. If you do a true effort to RPE of 10, that’s the hardest you can go. And again, we’re using this in the context of strength training here today, that would mean going to failure, which means you have zero reps in reserve. I was trying to make my hand face the camera the right way.

Zero reps in reserve. You have no reps left. You have gone to failure. So 10 plus zero equals 10. So that’s how you can kind of use these scales complementary. So you can either ask yourself, how hard was that effort, or how many more reps do I think I have left in the tank? And we’ll talk about some pros and cons here in a little bit. But why I really like using RPE or RIR for my clients, especially those of you who are in again, midlife, you’re over 40, you’re not 20 years old anymore. You know, we’re not in college, etc.

We’re not in that decade, we’re in a new chapter of life. The value of using something like RPE is that it helps to tailor your workout intensity, to match your daily energy level, your daily bandwidth. How much capacity you have today, now, when you step into the gym for your session, or you’re out in the garage doing your workout, so it allows you to have a moment to check in with yourself as you’re lifting and think, you know, wow, actually I did. I slept super great and my nutrition has been on point.

I haven’t been skipping meals like I had before. My stress has been pretty low, and today I feel really freaking great. Then our load for today’s RPE seven on squats might be different from what it was a few weeks ago, when we are under higher stress and we weren’t sleeping as well. Maybe we were having a hard time fueling ourselves regularly, so our energy levels work a lot lower, or we’re just kind of going through it with being in this perimenopause to menopause, plus transition where there’s hormonal shifting, and that’s affecting things like our energy levels, sleep, etc. So yes, RPE and reps and reserve can be used for anyone, any kind of trainee.

But again, thinking about contextually, why are these things so useful for women in this phase of life? Right? So it’s not saying like this is some this isn’t a proprietary way that women over 40 can manage their own strength training. However, it is a validated tool that we can use because it is contextually, allowing us more flexibility within the structure of a program such that we don’t just completely skip workouts all the time if we’re not feeling up to hitting 90% or 85% of our one rep max, as an example, and I mentioned there Earlier that reps in reserve slash, I guess RPE has been validated in terms of scientific literature and study.

There was a study that came out in 2016 by Zordos and this study was all about looking at reps in reserve and how well it paired with something like an RPE scale while predicting things like one rep max and or multiples of a rep max type of situation with bench press and squat, and so I can link that study, it was in, I think, the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research, and just sort of you can see what was looked into there. But there have been other studies that have looked at how useful is RPE/Reps and Reserve for strength training. And it turns out it’s a pretty darn useful auto-regulation tool. So that’s a little bit about specifically RPE and RA are.

So I’ve used the term auto Regulation A few times already in this podcast episode, and I want to spend a little bit of time pulling back just a just a bit and explaining why auto regulation is so useful, auto meaning self so auto regulation, we’re going to be regulating our efforts ourself based on how I feel, how I feel each day, each session. So that means I could adjust the intensity of the workout. And again, if we’re talking about strength training, typically, intensity is going to be gaged with how much weight we’re going to lift, although if we’re doing cardio, that could just be our overall heart rate or just sort of our subjective effort. It could mean adjusting our volume.

Volume means reps, time sets, so that’s just the amount of work that we’re doing and even our exercise selection. These are just a few examples of how you could auto-regulate or self-regulate your own workouts. But Steph, how do we do this if we’re following progressive overload? So I’m going to talk about that here in a second. And again, if you’re over 40, or in midlife, I hate to keep hammering on this, but you’re going to have oftentimes unpredictable life demands. There’s a lot of changing responsibilities that you might have.

Maybe your kids are finally getting older, but your parents are getting older as well or or other family members, and suddenly you find yourself care taking or really having to help those family members out right job situations, hormones fluctuating and changing, sleep being impacted, recovery, not being as quick as it used to be. So having auto-regulation as something we’re aware of is hugely beneficial, because, again, we can make adjustments to have flexibility within the structure of a program. Instead of just going, Well, fuck it, I can’t do that today, so I’m not going to do anything.

And look, sometimes you need those fuck it kind of days, and some days you’re you’re sick or it’s just not a good day to train for whatever reason. However, by adjusting the plan and introducing that flexibility via auto-regulation, you actually get a pretty darn good workout that’s better off in the long run than skipping consecutive workouts or skipping large blocks of your workouts because. Is you just feel like you can’t be perfect and have perfect adherence to whatever the plan said?

So quite often I’ll ask my lifters inside of Strong With Steph, and we use an app. That app is called True Coach, and it’s custom to the program that I’ve written. There’s just like, punched my mic. That is, there is a space under each exercise to log, reps, sets, the weight that you lifted. But also, subjectively, how are you feeling? You know, didn’t sleep well. Energy is great. Recovery feels on point. Feel feeling crispy around the edges. And that’s all part of the sort of tapestry of your own unique auto-regulation and recovery and getting to know yourself over time.

Even if I was in the gym with you and I was watching you lift, sure I could observe, you know, the quality of your lifting. And I do that with my premium members, those folks who are coaching with me, and we exchange videos back and forth, and do form analysis and breakdown and all sorts of great things. But sure, I could look at how well you’re moving. I could look at how fast the bar is moving.

Are you getting kind of buried by the bar, or is the bar moving really well? Does it seem like you had many reps left in the tank or not, but you also have such important data and information about yourself that you can observe and get better at observing over time and get to know yourself better, especially as your body is changing, your life is changing.

So yes, having a coach there watching you is great, but also you can still collect lots of very interesting, very important, and impactful information about yourself and use that for auto-regulation. So for example, in Strong With Steph, quite often times you’ll see that we start with a lower RPE. So in the very early stage, even if somebody’s had some lifting experience, maybe you’ve taken a break, though, or you’re looking to kind of get back into some lifting structure.

Quite often times we start maybe at RPE, six or seven. But oftentimes, I’ll give you a range. So if you’re feeling crispy, you know, not feeling great, didn’t sleep as well, feeling kind of sore, joint soreness, etc. Then you could keep it at RPE, six or four reps in reserve, a little bit less intensity. And generally that’s going to come out to be whatever weight you’re going to pick for your dumbbells or on put on the bar that day. Another thing that I bake into the program for flexibility quite often is a different range of reps and sets.

Now it’s not going to be vastly different, so it’s not going to say, you know, one to eight sets of whatever number of reps, because that’s just we don’t need to be doing really eight sets of anything. You get the point, it’s not going to be that drastic. But somebody might encounter something that says something like two to three sets of eight to 12 reps, or eight to 10 reps is pretty common, especially in accessory work, when we’re working just a little bit higher in the rep range, so that would allow you on that day. Let’s say you have a ton of energy. You’re feeling really great.

Maybe you have a little bit more time, maybe you pick three sets of 10, and you’re feeling good, but maybe you’re pressed on time, or you didn’t feel as good walking in the gym. You’re feeling like you’re moving a little bit more unpredictably, bars moving kind of sloppy. You just don’t feel as locked in. Then you could choose two sets of eight. The point being, you have flexibility within the structure. Again, with volume, we’re going to see we can choose different numbers of reps and sets, and again.

Over time, when folks are able to adhere to the program more consistently, they’re seeing better results, more strength, better gains in muscle mass and so on. And then the exercise choice, this is another one where I give folks flexibility. Now there is progression in the program. So for example, we see simpler, say split squat, split squat, Say that 10 times best simpler split squat variations toward the beginning of the program, but as you get toward the middle and end of the program, you’re starting to see more complex or challenging split squat type variations.

However, also within each each session, each lifting session of your week, you’re going to see at least two options. Usually it’s three or four exercise options that are in the same universe, typically of what is the movement pattern you’re trying to work but also gives you a little bit more. More flexibility and structure. So quite often I will have folks who, let’s say they’re having a little bit more knee sensitivity for whatever reason, not that that always indicates that, you know, sensation doesn’t always mean that we have acute injury.

But I have some folks with past injuries, or they just have more sensitive joints, and so they might choose a standard split squat variation over something like a rear foot elevated split squat, just depending how they’re feeling. So again, keeping it in the same universe of that movement pattern, but giving choice in terms of exercise selection. So again, there is structure, but there’s also flexibility, and I think that that’s a really key take-home message and take-home point of this particular podcast. So a couple of more things here, just to kind of wrap it up.

So when we’re looking at again benefits for women over 40, we want to look at enhanced consistency. So adjusting your intensity means that you can keep with the program, keep moving forward. I hate to say stay on track because there’s going to be times when you just can’t stay on track.

Also, for a lot of people, becomes a bit of a mental battle where they feel like they’re falling off and getting back on and falling off and getting back on, and that can become a bit of an all-or-nothing, almost, or it just creates a lot of mental stress. So just, you know, thinking about keeping moving forward, even on lower energy days. I see this so much with a lot of my clients.

I also have clients who have erratic work schedules, work night shift, or other things, where sometimes they’ve just come off of working a few days in a row and they’re just feeling more tired, so they’re able to, again, adjust their intensity of their workout, but still get a good workout in. And I’m finding with my clients as well as myself, the longer the break, the longer the break, for whatever reason this, the harder it is to get back into it, mentally and physically.

Doesn’t mean it’s impossible. You will get back to it if you’re persistent, but it’s easier to do a little something. Take the intensity back, take the volume back, choose an easier variation, meet yourself better on that low-energy day, then taking off weeks and months at a time. It’s sort of how easy is it to pick back up, and sometimes, if physically and mentally, it feels like too much of a hill to climb.

Now it’s a meta Hills become a mountain that’s enough to really take people off lifting. You know, self selected, but keep people from lifting in four years. Meanwhile, you know, we could keep going as best as we can, even if we’re not firing on every single cylinder at 100% I also see a lot with my clients that auto regulation, in combination with things like RPE, helps to meet better your recovery needs and not that overreaching is a bad thing.

Of course, we talked about in the last episode why we need stress on the body in order to see adaptation, we also need good recovery and so on and so forth. But it can help people to pull back a little bit when they realize they might have pushed a little bit too hard and their body isn’t quite recovered enough in whatever the next session is, sometimes they’ll have clients do back-to-back days, because sometimes they have to based on their schedule, and sometimes that second day they’re just going to pull back a little bit if they’re not feeling well enough recovered so that that does happen, sometimes people do back to back workouts. Rarely do.

I recommend three full-body days in a row. It’s just a lot to recover from, especially if you’re really pushing the intensity. But sometimes you do two in a row, and then you’re like, on this second day, I’m not as recovered. So you might, you might pull back a little bit, but it’s still going to be maybe three or four reps in the tank, or two or three reps in the tank based on how you feel that day. And ultimately, we’re in it for the long haul. And I said this in the beginning, you know, unfortunately, the fitness industry is so hell dense on these quick fix results and showing these side-by-side transformations, just like the diet industry.

You know, here’s what this person’s physique transformed into in six weeks, or whatever it is. And that kind of quick fix mentality, though, is it’s important for clients to feel like they’re making progress. That kind of quick fix mentality that’s perpetuated by the industry, by coaches and trainers can set the expectation. Question on the client side, that this stuff is just going to be boom, quick flash in the pan, like we’re going to get super quick results, and it’s going to be this rapid transformation.

And then, side note, we can just stop, if we stop training, we’re going to see, hopefully, things, you know, we can maintain for a little bit, but eventually we’re going to see that our adaptations drop away, right? We become de trained. We may experience atrophy of our muscle on the cardiovascular side, right? We’re going to become less cardiovascularly fit. We’re going to see strength drop off to some degree, right?

And so we have to keep training if we want to, you know, continue to either maintain or make gains over time, gains in strength, gains in muscle mass, gains in power, gains in our balance, and we’ll talk about those elements in further episodes. So the name of the game here is sustainability over time, continuing to show up and do our best, but also meet ourselves where we are at. So again, auto regulation wise, it’s going to be easier to do this over time.

Now I mentioned pros and cons, and I’ve talked a lot about the pros of using things like auto regulation, reps and reserve and rate of perceived exertion in your lifting. Some of the cons here, the drawbacks, if you’re somebody who is, oh, you just want someone to tell you what to put on the bar or load your bar for you. And I know that there are trainers who work with people in person, and they provide that service, they load the bar for the client, or they tell the client exactly how much to move up what weight they should be lifting.

Now, personally, I would rather see the trainer also ask the client what they think to help them build that skill. But I guess that’s not up to me. It’s just how I would do things. I can’t control what everybody does as a trainer or a coach. However, the cons for some people, again, would be, if you want to just be told what to put on the bar and what to lift at all times. Now I have seen again, the drawbacks of that.

For example, I have a client who’s come to me after working with a coach for a couple of years, and now this person is looking to move into a little bit more of a hybrid situation, where they have me for coaching and assistance, but they’re also working out at home, not in a gym setting with a trainer staring at them. And this person’s finding it a little bit challenging to now learn how to assess their own lifting, like how many reps do I have left in the tank?

I’m going to check this out. I’m going to try it out and see what I think and make my best estimate or guesstimate on that front. So it can be a little bit of a learning curve for folks who are newer or haven’t experienced this idea before of how much weight should be on the bar, or maybe you come from a CrossFit setting, and you’re used to looking at, well, what is the RX weight on the board for the day? RX is 95 pounds, or RX is 75 pounds.

RX, if you don’t know, is the prescribed weight of the day, or sort of the standard weight of whatever the movement happened to be. So you might still make adjustments. But oftentimes people are used to sort of looking for that. Hey, here’s the here’s the standard to shoot for. So again, it might take time, if you’re somebody who’s used to that, and it’s also a bit of a moving target, right? Again, it takes practice.

So oftentimes people will come into Strong With Steph, and they’re a little bit at the beginning feeling a little bit like I’m not quite sure how much, how many reps I have left in the tank, and I do have some assessments peppered throughout the program to sort of help you make some of those gages. However, for the most part, I just encourage people to try it out and see how they feel and to get to know it over time. And ultimately, people do pretty darn good in terms of assessing how many reps they have left in the tank, or what effort on a scale of 10, that particular load was that day, or that particular set was on that day.

And I didn’t really go into how do we assess, for example, the RPE of individual reps, or the RPE of the set? And that’s a little bit more of an advanced topic. However, one simple thing you can do is, once you finish your set, ask yourself, how many more reps do I think I could do? How many more reps did I have in the tank? If I could think I could do one, then, okay, my RPE was nine. I was actually working at a really high effort. If I think I could do five more, then I’m probably not hitting the intended stimulus.

If the prescribed RPE range was seven to eight, right, I could I have a little bit more. Latitude to put weight on the bar and consider that what I just did was a warm-up or ramp-up set. Okay, so I hope that this has given you a little bit of insight into not only what is RPE reps and reserve and auto regulation, how I use them in my program, but how you might also see them being used out in the world, the benefits and the drawbacks potentially of using these methods, and ultimately, why I really believe that these are helpful for women over 40 who are trying to improve their strength and more committed to that process in the long term, because it helps you to navigate the ups and downs that are no doubt going to come your way as you’re integrating strength training along with the rest of your life.

Remember assess your energy level, soreness, readiness, how well the bar is moving in your warm up sets at the start of your workout, and think about how you can adjust your effort to match the RPE, or reps in reserve that’s written on the day, so you could decrease or increase your load, your reps, volume, your intensity, if your energy is high or low, just depending on how you’re feeling, and check in with yourself. Most importantly, make sure you keep track of things. Take notes. Look for patterns. Look for other factors in your life that could be affecting your energy levels, your ability to meet a particular RPE on that day.

Whatever load you’re going to choose, how recovered you feel, how did you sleep? All of these factors can certainly play a role in using RPE reps and reserve and auto-regulation. They’re powerful tools. Use them wisely practice and you’ll see that they can be helpful so much as you implement a long-term program that does it for this episode of the show.

Now, again, I’d like to invite you to check out my seven-day sample of Strong With Steph. This is my progressive training program for women over 40. Purpose-built for you. I’ve already shared in this episode some of the guiding principles I talked in the last episode about progressive overload. And here, of course, about the topics that we covered today, and why? Those are all parts of this program that I’ve created for you.

In future episodes, we’re going to be diving more into details, such as why I include things like movement prep, balance work, power and Plyometrics, and strength work. What is the accessory work? What does that even mean? Why are cool downs important and so much more, we’re going to be diving into those detailed topics, but what we’ve covered in the past two episodes are going to give us the big picture when it comes to how I put this program together and why.

So you can check out my free lifting guide for women over 40, and get a seven-day sample of Strong With Steph by going to stephgaudreau.com/workout put in your name and email, and I’ll send that guide to you, and you can start lifting and start practicing with things like RPE and auto-regulation progressive overload in your own lifting. All right, until then, when I see you next time, be sure you hit the subscribe button if you like this episode. And until next time, stay strong.

RPE & Autoregulation: Smart Tools for Strength Gains Over 40 | Steph Gaudreau.