Training load and RPE

Training load is how much work an athlete has done. Not how well they played, and not how they felt about it. Just the size of the dose.

There are two kinds. External load is the work itself: minutes on court, balls hit, metres covered, jumps performed. Internal load is what that work cost the athlete: heart rate response, perceived effort, hormonal and neuromuscular strain. Two players can do the same external session and carry very different internal loads. The one who slept four hours pays more.

Rating of perceived exertion

RPE is the athlete's own rating of how hard a session felt. We use the CR-10 scale, sometimes called the modified Borg scale, which runs from 0 at rest to 10 at maximal effort. It is subjective by design. Perceived effort integrates everything the athlete's nervous system knows about the session, including the parts a stopwatch cannot see.

Session RPE

Foster's session RPE turns a feeling into a number you can add up across a week. Multiply the CR-10 rating by the duration in minutes.

A 90 minute session at RPE 6 gives 540 AU. A 40 minute recovery session at RPE 2 gives 80 AU. Add every session and match in a day and you have daily load. That single number is the input to almost everything else in this handbook.

Matches count, and they count heavily

A three set junior match can produce more load than any training session that week. Tournament weeks will look like spikes in the data because they are spikes. The software marks tournament days on the charts so nobody panics at a number that has an obvious cause.