Autoregulation

Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is a scale that's used to grade exercise intensity. I avoided using it for a few years, with the aim of keeping my training "simple". My ethos at the time was "training to failure", and although that may work for high rep hypertrophy focused training, for low rep strength training, not so much - well, maybe if I was still in my 20s it'd be fine, but still it means recovery is much harder to come by.

For example, one week my target deadlift would be 160kg for 6 reps, and if successful the next week would increment to 162.5kg and trying again for 6, but expecting around 4 - got the 160kg for 6 at a maximum-almost-seeing-stars effort, and the next week couldn't break 162.5kg off the floor, for a big fat zero as I had not recovered from the previous week's workout. And this happened many times with different movements at different weights. Trying the standard practise of de-load 10%, and build up again (with some additional lower weight volume reps) sometimes worked, but the next plateau was quick to come by.

So, the stimulus for adaptation was being applied, but there was never enough recovery for the adaptation to be realised.

This past year I've been using RPE. Training is marginally more "complicated", but with the majority of the training rarely exceeding RPE 8 (i.e. 2 reps left in the tank) then recovery/adaptation has been easier to come by for my most productive year (well, bar the first year and all the "newbie-gains"). In fact, I'm now on a Low Fatigue program where RPE 7 (3 reps in the tank - or, minimal change in velocity between each rep) is the norm, and that's going really well right now - it's a 16wk program, so around March I get to test my max for (hopefully!) some hard proof.

RPE started life in the running world, but has since been applied across disciplines, so if you find yourself stalled and not progressing, would highly recommend looking into applying it to your workouts.

Weight training RPE chart

Running/Conditioning RPE chart

Also, if your training is frequently at RPE 9 and even more so at RPE 10, then not only are you incurring more fatigue and impacting recovery, but are also potentially exposing yourself to a higher risk of injury