The following blog takes a quick look at how I’ve used weekly wellness and session RPE to automatically help guide training decisions. The examples come from one of the Sustainable Training SMART Templates created in conjunction with Strength Ratio.
So, weekly wellness (in this example) is done at the end of the week because we want to look at the cumulative effects of your training and the impact it’s had on your body. In the example, I used sleep, mood, energy, motivation, and soreness. The template is only 3 or 4 days of training, so we would hope that they're all feeling good, depending on what you've done on your weekend. It is important that these are filled out as honestly as possible, as it will make a difference in the long run. I have used a basic traffic light system to provide some instant feedback when filling the categories out.
We have also used relative volume in the template, which relates to the sets and reps that you've achieved and the intensity of the weight you've lifted. The template compares the relative volume week to week to gauge the level of increase and estimate its effect on the body.
Session RPE relates to how hard you found each training session in the week and the culmination of them all. For the weekly roundup, we have simply calculated the AVERAGE of all the sessions.
The example below shows a week where the RPE is pretty high and the wellness results aren't great. As this is week 1 of the programme, we can ignore relative volume as we have nothing to compare it to. These results are essentially saying "okay, you've had a pretty bad week. You found it hard and your wellness isn't fantastic (but it's not awful) so we're going to leave it up to you to wherever you take a deload”.
Now, if you were to couple a really bad week of training with a really bad mood, really bad sleep, and really bad motivation, you can see the template now “highly recommends you take that deload week”. So there is a culmination of factors that are going to come into play. In the scenario where everything feels good and the numbers look good, the template simply recommends continuing as normal.
Hopefully, this provides a quick insight into how easily you can combine and, more importantly, automate wellness and RPE data into your programme. As always, don’t take these as gospel truth, they are merely indicators and flags to take into consideration when training. If you've got any questions, please post them in the comment section below.
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