RPE in football: a simple way to monitor training load

RPE asks a player for one answer after a session. Collected consistently, that answer becomes a history of the player’s individual internal training load. It has been studied for decades, tested in football, compared with heart-rate and GPS measures, and is practical even where a club has no expensive monitoring technology.

What RPE actually measures

Training load has two complementary sides. External load is the work completed: distance, high-speed running, sprints, accelerations and decelerations. Internal load is the individual response to that work. Two players can complete the same session and still experience it differently.

RPE — Rating of Perceived Exertion — does not claim to measure metres run. It answers a different and useful question: how hard did this work feel for this player? This is why GPS and RPE are not competing tools. They describe different parts of the same training process.

From RPE to session-RPE

The practical session-RPE method is associated with Carl Foster and colleagues. The calculation is simple:

session-RPE = RPE × session duration in minutes

For example, RPE 6 after a 90-minute session equals 540 arbitrary units (AU). The number is not a universal score to compare between clubs. Its value is in comparing the same player across sessions, weeks and phases of the season.

What the research in football shows

In an English Premier League study, Kelly and colleagues followed 19 outfield players through 43 competition weeks and collected 1,010 individual training observations. The within-player association between session-RPE and heart-rate load was r = 0.75 overall. The relationship was also strong across positions, from 0.70 for central and wide midfielders to 0.84 for forwards.

Alexiou and Coutts reported similar results in elite women’s football: across 735 training sessions and matches, session-RPE correlated r = 0.83–0.85 with three common heart-rate load calculations. These results do not mean that RPE reproduces a heart-rate monitor. They show that a properly collected subjective response can track meaningful change in internal load.

Research in youth football and academy settings supports the same practical point. Familiarisation matters: players need to understand that they are rating the overall difficulty of the completed session, not their performance, mood, or the final drill only. Collect answers privately where possible and at a consistent time after training.

The coach does not always know the player’s dose

A training plan is not the same as the load received. Brink and colleagues compared coaches’ planned doses with the responses of U17 and U19 players across 2,446 sessions. Correlations were modest: r = 0.24 for intensity, r = 0.49 for duration and r = 0.41 for overall load. Light and medium sessions were often perceived as harder than coaches expected; heavy sessions were sometimes perceived as easier.

That is the core reason to collect RPE. A session labelled “recovery” does not automatically create a recovery response in every player. RPE gives staff a way to check whether the intended session matched the player’s experience.

What to monitor

A single RPE of 7 has little meaning without context. A sequence of session-RPE values allows staff to see weekly totals, compare microcycles, identify players who repeatedly report a higher cost from the same work, and notice changes from an individual baseline. Trends are usually more informative than one isolated score.

Training monotony is commonly calculated as mean daily load divided by the standard deviation of daily load within a week. Training strain is weekly load multiplied by monotony. These metrics describe the structure of work; they are not medical diagnoses.

ACWR can also describe load dynamics, but it must not be treated as an automatic injury detector. Important methodological criticism remains, and a randomised study of 482 elite youth footballers found no reduction in health problems when coaches managed load using published ACWR principles.

A practical starting point

Explain the question, give the squad time to practise using the scale, collect an individual answer after each session, calculate session-RPE and build a consistent history. No GPS, heart-rate system or sport scientist is required to begin.

In UTeam Club, players complete RPE through UTEAM Mobile after training and matches. Responses reach the staff interface, where individual and team data can be reviewed alongside weekly load, monotony, strain and other indicators.

If a dedicated platform is not available, the free Google Sheets and Google Forms template below provides a structured first step. The essential ingredient is not complex technology. It is the regular collection of comparable data.

One player response is a subjective number. Hundreds of responses collected with the same method become the history of how that player is coping with the training process.