Okay, welcome everyone to a new episode of the Jeff Nippard podcast. This is the fourth installment of the

How Hard Should You Train miniseries, and in this one I'm speaking with Dr. Eric Helms. This was a really good

discussion. It was one of the few conversations I've had recently that felt right at the boundary of what we

currently know about training, and we discuss some new concepts that I bet many of you probably

haven't thought about before.

So we start at the podcast with some overarching framework for what it really means to

train hard definitionally. And then we move on to questions like what the minimum RPE is for

maximizing muscle growth, whether or not there are any potential issues with your average

gym goer relying on RPE, whether volume or intensity is the most

fundamental variable. We discuss what the science says about if there's any difference between

taking sets to, say, an RPE of 8 versus an RPE of 10, and the difference between session

RPE, so how hard your workout was as a whole, and set RPE, so how hard each individual set feels.

Now, just in case you're a bit rusty on the terminology, RPE stands for rating of perceived

exertion.

And as we discuss it here, it essentially just ranks how hard your set was on a scale

of 1 to 10.

So an RP of 10 would mean you reached failure with good form.

An RP 9 means you could have done one more rep, but you left one rep in the tank.

RP8 would mean you had two reps in the tank.

RP 7 means you had three reps in the tank, and so on.

And as always, I'll have time stamps to all these topics in the show notes down below in case you want to hop around.

But I think that listening to the whole thing will really get you thinking critically about your training and should help you put some of these concepts to use.

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