Session RPE (sRPE)
Also known as: Overall Session Effort, Foster sRPE
A single 1-10 effort rating for an entire training session, recorded after the session ends. Unlike per-exercise RPE (which captures individual sets), sRPE rolls the whole session into one number — your subjective answer to "how hard was today, all-in?".
Formula
sRPE = your 1-10 rating for the session as a whole. We use logData.rpe as the canonical sRPE input regardless of when entered (athlete-chosen timing).Example
A 70-minute strength session that felt very challenging: sRPE 8. A 30-minute mobility session: sRPE 3. The same hour-long bike ride done easy = sRPE 4, done hard = sRPE 8 — same duration, very different load.
How Afitpilot Uses This
sRPE is the input that drives our primary internal-load metric, AU (sRPE x duration). It's also what we compare against the prescribed target RPE to compute effort delta. We do not enforce a 30-minutes-after-session window — Afitpilot is self-coached, so timing is the athlete's call.
sRPE in research and practice
| Who / Context | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Foster (2001) | sRPE x duration = AU | Original sRPE method, now the workhorse of internal-load monitoring across team sports and endurance |
| Elite team sport (rugby/football) | Daily sRPE submission is standard | Aggregated weekly to manage acute:chronic load and weekly periodization |
| Self-coached lifter | Often skipped | Why we made the input optional and zero-friction — one tap on the post-session modal |
| Endurance athlete | Borg-derived scale, originally cardio-first | Strength-RPE is the newer cousin; both map to the same 1-10 axis |
Known Limitations
- •sRPE is one number for the whole session, so a session that started easy and ended brutal gets averaged in your head — it loses the time-course detail that per-set RPE would capture.
- •Subjective. Caffeine, mood, sleep, and stress all colour the rating. Two athletes reporting sRPE 8 may be at different actual physiological loads.
- •When sRPE is entered hours after the session, recall bias creeps in — athletes tend to round toward how the hardest moment felt rather than the average.
- •Not yet used in the LLM context — sRPE drives the AU number for the athlete and coach, but plan regeneration prompts still consume per-set RPE rollups.
What We're Improving
Science Context
Foster's session RPE method (2001) is one of the most widely validated internal-load tools in sport science. It correlates well with heart-rate-based TRIMP scores in endurance sport, and with blood lactate responses in mixed work. The method's strength is universality — it produces a single comparable number across strength, endurance, and skill modalities, where modality-specific external-load metrics (tonnage, distance, power) cannot be combined.