#056 - sRPE, ACWRs, and EWMAs within Applied Performance Sciences

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Random ShowVersion and are discussing some of my thoughts surrounding the use of sRPE in applied settings, the Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio (ACWR), and other derivative expressions of acute:chronic formulas like the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) equation.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. Hey everybody, I want to remind you of one thing, rather than trying to spam you with advertisements to technology companies trying to sell their latest gizmo or gadget, I have a monthly newsletter that is chocked full of research articles, interesting tools, tactics, techniques, things I'm finding interesting on the worldwide web. Check it out by going to AdamRingler.com forward slash

[00:00:51] Newsletter. Pop in your email and I promise you I will never spam you or try to sell you something in that newsletter. I think you're going to find it really fascinating and interesting. I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. So once again, check it out at AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Hey everybody, we have a great decoding excellence show today. Today we get into the weeds talking about RPE scales. It might not be the craziest, most technologically savviest conversation about the latest sort of performance enhancing technologies out there,

[00:01:27] But it is a very reliable and dependable and easy, simple tool that you can utilize tomorrow. Right away, you can literally grab a clipboard, pencil, paper, and begin to implement this strategy right away. We talk about ACWRs, exponentially weighted moving averages, standard deviations, and statistical relevancy across these domains. Check it out, I think you'll get a lot of value out of the show. Hey everybody, this is AdamRingler and welcome to the decoding excellence show. Show where we get into the weeds of things, high performance, strength conditioning,

[00:02:05] Sport science, and just the acerteric, the weird things, right? That happens within coaching. So on the show today, I thought, like the intro talked about, I thought we would talk a little bit about session RPE, how we collect it, what we do with it, how we look at it and use that information to drive actionable changes, and maybe just generally some best practices across the utilization of RPE within team sport. So without further ado, let's get into the weeds of this. So what is rate of perceived exertion, RPE scales? How do we use it? What do we do? So every single training

[00:02:52] Session that one of our athletes do here at University of Colorado, but this is also widely adopted and utilized across other sports, it's not specific to just one sport here. This is a modality that can be used across all of our athletes, right? But every single training session we do, we record the duration of the training session, right? And we also ask the athletes with within their subjective lens, how exerting was that session? Arnaz, one through 10 scale, one being the least intent being the most absolute grueling of a session. And we have

[00:03:37] Verbiage and we have labels to go through this one through 10 scale. They also have the option that if they didn't participate in that session, that they could click a button and it would ultimately say, hey, I didn't participate in this session zero on this. And then obviously we wouldn't get any sort of training impulse or any sort of training load associated with their RPE times multiplied by the duration of the session. So this does a couple different things for us. Number one, it allows us to first capture attendance at a session if they were fully participating

[00:04:14] In the training session. If they were partially modified, let's say they went through 45 minutes of a 60 minute session. We would categorize that differently than a full session, right? We would say that they only did partial session. And then we would change the time duration associated with their participation. Perhaps you have some people that are doing a modified training program. So let's just say in the example that, you know, we have a 60 minute training session, it is on basketball court, volleyball court, soccer pitch, whatever it may be,

[00:04:48] Wherever their environment exists at. And there's three athletes or two athletes that might be injured and they're doing a modified training program. In that case, we would categorize their participation as modified, right? Because their sort of involvement within that training session would artificially skew the team average one way or another. So when they are labeled as modified, their sort of training load, if you will, do not factor in to the group average within that training session. Okay? So that's important to know. Also, just as an aside, if they are only doing a partial session,

[00:05:30] Then that also does not factor in to the team average as well, right? And you could understand why that might be important. If 80% of your squad is doing a full, full participation, full duration team session, then that is the most accurate representation of that practice or that training session, right? But if we modify it, right, through different modalities or different drills for whatever reason, whether it's a return to play or some type of medical limitation that they are restricting them from doing some type of drill, right? Then we wouldn't want to negatively

[00:06:08] Down skew that training load across the team involvement, right? So when you start to communicate these things to a head coach or across domains, across departments, you want to make sure that the data that you're presenting is actually accurate. And it's not an artificial representation of too much training load or too little. So we ask our athletes this with every training session. So it could be in the weight room. And we have different weight room sessions, whether it's speed, strength, regenerative, if it's a power session, if it's more of hypertrophy

[00:06:45] Type of session, we also have a number of different training sessions on our practice, whether it's a neutral site, if it's home, if it's away, if it's a walkthrough, if it's voluntary, if it's mandatory. And this is also very important because yes, we can capture attendance, we can capture sort of some type of arbitrary unit loading across this RPE or session RPE, right, through the duration and through the exertion skill. But we can also start to categorize our training into different sort of types, right? We could look at a training we can say, well, we did three sessions in the

[00:07:24] Weight room and it contributed to this amount of load. We did seven sessions through technical, tactical, and we were working on X, Y, or Z. And at that contributed to this other type of load. And we can start to play with the relationship of different session types. We can also categorize, you know, normal C across different session types. So we can say, hey, we need to bump up our training load or we want to increase our training load this on the 11th week of training. And we know we only want to increase it. Let's just say 20%. Well, what what session types can contribute

[00:08:02] Towards that 20% it might be that we would need three gym sessions to be able to fill that gap or we could do an additional 45 minute on court session or on pitch session. And that would also fill that training training load void. So you can see why it would be important to start to categorize different sort of sessions. So you can so again, get better understanding of what type of sessions contribute, what amount of loads. So we do this. We're fortunate enough here at University of Colorado work with Kipman Labs. But you could again, you could do this across different AMSs. You could

[00:08:39] Do it on pencil on paper on a clipboard. You could do it on Google Drive. Yeah, there's probably some more more nuanced ways of doing it and some more, you know, intelligent and articulate ways of managing all of this data coming into you. But again, you can use whatever modality, whatever means methods that you might want to be able to capture this is very, it's very simplistic in some respects. Now, we could get into the formatics sort of ways that we calculate different training loads, right? You could look at your typical acute chronic or, you know, ACWRs or acute chronic

[00:09:19] Workload ratios. And you could run, you know, your typical seven and 28. So it's seven being on the seven, the last seven days. That's your acute load. You can look at your 28 day sort of chronic load. Also, you know, obviously just another way of saying your fitness fatigue, right? So more of a banister model, you could run smaller scales. So we have a number of different equations set up where we're looking at things like a three to 12 day load. We look at a, I want to say for 12 of four to 16, we look at a five to 20. We look at a six and 24. And then

[00:10:03] Obviously the seven and 28. We also use and we don't particularly pay too much attention to ACWRs just because as if you followed much of the literature over the last year or two, right? The acute chronic workload ratio has sort of been debunked by a number of different professionals within our field, right? We do happen to look at sort of a more exponentially weighted moving average. So an EWMA expression of the ACWR workload ratio. So this takes into account that previous workloads in your chronic duration, whether that's 28 days, whether that's 20 days, whether that's,

[00:10:44] You know, as we continue to go down 16, 12 days, that the further away the session type is, the less influence it has on sort of that chronic load. And why that's important is as you would imagine that loads 28 days are right on the cusp of falling out of that range, let's say the 27th or 28th day, right? That has a less contribution towards your fitness, right? Because fitness doesn't last forever as you would know, right? You could go out and build up this great amount of workload, and that would, you know, in the short term, it would contribute to your fatigue, but in the long term,

[00:11:22] It contributes towards your fitness, but it doesn't exist forever. It eventually falls off. And as the more acute, as the more near load, as a greater impact and influence on that sort of fitness that you have built. So we use ACWRs through the EWMA expression of the ACWR ratio. Now, so yes, we take it from, you know, we multiply time times the RPE that goes into our ATHLEAN management system, and then we can run those formulas off the top end of it. Now, we do a number of different things. We look at workloads across the week, workloads across the day.

[00:12:06] So trying to identify athletes that are more tolerable to larger workloads and who needs top ups and who needs to just be sort of who, as a staff, we need to be cognizant of managing their workloads. We also look from week to week and day to day. So like, where are workloads stacking up to the previous week's amount of work? Are we 20%, 10%, you know, 30% above or below? You know, so how many standard deviations are we above or below on a seven-day mean or on a 14-day mean? And certain to have a better understanding of our loading strategies so that we make our more intense

[00:12:45] And hard days hard and we allow our easier days to be less fatiguing. And this is all an attempt to again, right? Set us up for the most amount of success on game day on the days where we are evaluated through competition. So we use RPE's quite a bit in our training status. Now, when we look at sort of the individual aspects of it, it's highly veritable, right? One athlete might report the session was a three, which is rather on the low end. Another athlete might, you know, say or record that the session was a seven or a nine, right? And obviously, we got to

[00:13:21] Take into account that there are positional differences, right? So perhaps you are looking at positional averages across your group. So what is the averages for your forwards, sure, you know, guards or whatever it might be across your different positions, whether it's an American football or an soccer or if it's, you know, basketball, volleyball, whatever, you name it, right? There will be different job requirements for each position that can contribute to greater or lower workload. So cross a given practice just because of the nature of what those bio demands are that their

[00:13:56] Position necessitates. It can be highly veritable from position to position, but in addition, it can be highly veritable from individual to individual, even within that position group. So this allows us to really individualize, you know, when you start to look at A, the training programs and the workload strategies that you might employ across your planning or your training schedule a week or a given day. It also allows us, you know, you can once the information comes through your system, you can start to look at things like standard deviations on individual.

[00:14:32] So you can look, you know, perhaps if an athlete is being a session, right, or they're recorded through the week, is that training load in 1.5 to standard deviations higher or lower than their norm across the day, right? And that can contribute or at least provide you some information whether or not the session was, you know, or intense or not, right? So we have different ways that you can sort of statistically draw some information from the data as it comes into the system. But the most important thing is making sure that you get that information into

[00:15:07] Whatever system. And I say system with air quotes, which really, you know, on a podcast does really poorly because this isn't a video and you can't see my, I sort of fingers in the air quotes. But I say that because it can be as simple as, you know, pencil and paper on a clipboard. So now there are best practices when it goes to actually collecting it, right? The verbiage that you use to describe the numeral sort of one through 10 can should obviously remain consistent. The method in which you collect that information should stay relatively consistent, right? So that, you know,

[00:15:43] Color scales aren't flipped from one modality to another. The time duration from collection, from post training to actual collection should also remain consistent. So, you know, it shouldn't be immediately right after a training session. I think most of the literature says somewhere between 10 to 20 minutes. I want to say it's 10. I would need to dive back into it by 10 minutes post training. Just to allow for, you know, athletes to have a greater understanding of the collective loads and exertion across the practice and not necessarily the last most recent drill that they

[00:16:19] Participated in. Because again, you know, some teams will do conditioning towards the end of their practice. And you don't want that to arbitrarily be what the athletes are deriving the sort of collective duration of across the start and the middle and the finish of the practice to be sort of artificially skewed just because the last drill was intense or the last drill wasn't intense. So, you want to obviously make sure that they are, you know, that there's some type of standardization across the way that you collect the information, the way that they are exposed to that information.

[00:16:55] Now, once you get that, it's ultimately up to you. Do you collect it and it just gathers dust? Or do you look at it? Do you analyze it? Do you bring that information into a conversation with the athletes regarding their workloads, regarding support staff, right? So, athletic trainers and nutritionalists and other people that support the program. Are you bringing it to the attention of a head coach, which is also obviously important, right? Because let's be honest, you know, as sports performance coaches, we don't always ever do practice planning when it comes to technical

[00:17:28] Technical. We'll do the bio demands, right? So, we'll look at the bio demands and we'll do the physical programming for, you know, the bio-energetic systems that contribute to their sport success. Yeah, sure. In weight room or additional energy system development or conditioning. Cool. Awesome. We do that, right? But we're not planning that they're doing a 3v3 sort of drill or any type of technical, tactical sort of execution. So, we need to at least categorize our drills, categorize our practices, record, monitor, urge and communicate our sort of workload strategies and try to do our

[00:18:08] Very best to make sure that everybody is aligned and everybody is aware of where we're at as an organization, as our athletes are at. And then draw particular attention to athletes that might be, you know, doing too much too soon or not being pushed hard enough that might be leaving money on the table. Because obviously we want to maximize the development not only from a physical domain, but we also want to maximize the development in a technical sense, right? Because that's, you know, talent wins and skill execution and skill acquisition matters. So, we want to make sure that athletes have

[00:18:43] The best likelihood of maximally deriving sport success through acquisition of information, through the execution of those technical technical abilities, under the sort of constraints, if you will, I'm probably a poor utilization of that word, but under the physical domains that they have developed, we want to make sure that they're doing those things, that they're maximizing their development through every domain. And if athletes need to be pushed, then we need to push them, right? But we also should identify that and we should have an understanding of when and where and how

[00:19:20] And when's the best timing across your sort of mezzle cycle or across your micro cycle or across your training week. Should you be pushing athletes, you know, game day minus one, that's ultimately up to you. I mean, particularly if that athlete needs additional loading, I would say that it's probably better, you know, minus three minus two and use your minus one as a sort of a taper into that game day. But again, that's that's ultimately up to your sort of periodization strategy and model. But we should at least start to formulate our own particular models when it comes to

[00:20:01] The deployment of different workloads and drills to elicit the workloads that we need. So this is a long-winded conversation, a one-way sort of monologue about utilization of session RPE, right? And but again, maybe you're wearing a GPS device and this we're talking about player load or we're talking about total distance. So we're talking about you name it, right? Whatever it might be, high speed running, right? You could still use this sort of EWMA or you know, accumulation of workload through whatever sort of metric that you derive your important stuff.

[00:20:37] But we should be ultimately measuring, managing, analyzing, communicating, and then acting upon that information in a meaningful way that actually elicits some type of practice change. Because if we're not intervening positively or negatively, then ultimately we're just collecting information to collect it. And that's a poor utilization of these strategies and particularly, it might be a poor utilization of your own time because it's wasting your own time as a practitioner, which we have a finite amount of anyways, right? It's not something that grows on trees that we can

[00:21:16] Just go and go to the wishing well and scoop out more time. It's not linear, right? It's not continuous. Like it will run out. But also as far as an athlete's time and attention, we need to respect that as well. So we need to be making sure that our touch points with them are utilized in the best way, in a way that supports the strategic sort of mission of the organization of the team. And ultimately delivers what they need, which might be information, which is awesome, right? Like some athletes might want to know more about what they're doing, but it also might be that,

[00:21:52] You know, they just want to be told what to do and when to push and when to hit the gas pedal and when to hit the brake. And we need to be cognizant of that through our conversations and interactions with our athletes and staff and organization, but we should have a handle on those things and fundamentally understand when, where to push back. And we as an industry have been historically or wrongly as a sort of scientist that we are always restrictive of workloads and workload monitoring or workload management did not play workload management, really bad name that we're

[00:22:32] Always restrictive, but we should try our very best to give the checkered flag, let it rip all gas pedal. Let's go as much as we can when we can win the information and the data suggests it so that when it does come time for us to go to our stakeholders and say, hey, we need to be cognizant about pulling back a little bit that it's not always gloom and doom when we come to them.

[00:23:01] Hey, everybody, that is going to be it for this episode of the decoding excellence show. Hopefully you took some actionable information away from this, uh, this episode, right? You can immediately begin to start to utilize session RPE across your athletes, right? And teams that you work with, it doesn't take a lot of resources to do. Yes, you can find technologies that are expensive and that utilize a lot of cool and crazy technologies, but it doesn't have to be that way you just have to begin. So hopefully you got the little nugget that you can start

[00:23:36] Using session RPE across your team sports. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam Ringler dot com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, um, sort of daily notes things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits, but ultimately to really try to improve my life and get something

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