Training by feel is based on the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) Scale, a method that teaches you to measure your workout’s intensity based on how you feel, allowing you to adapt the effort to your daily condition and become a more mindful athlete.
- Being a slave to GPS data can lead to frustration and overtraining because it ignores how your body is actually feeling on any given day.
- Training by feel uses the 1-to-10 RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) Scale to measure perceived effort.
- Each RPE level corresponds to a type of workout: RPE 3-4 for easy runs, RPE 5-6 for medium and tempo runs, RPE 7-9 for intervals and races.
- Training with RPE allows you to self-regulate your effort, prevents overtraining, and develops a deep mind-body connection.
- The goal isn’t to throw away your watch, but to learn to use your feelings as the most important data point.
What If the Best Coach for Understanding How You Feel Was Your Body (and Not Your Watch)?
There’s a modern form of slavery to which many of us have unknowingly submitted: the tyranny of the GPS. We go out for a recovery run and get anxious because our pace is five seconds slower than expected. We tackle an interval workout and feel frustrated if we don’t replicate last week’s times to the second, even if we’ve slept poorly and are stressed from work.
The watch, once a useful tool, has for some become a ruthless judge. It provides us with objective data but ignores the most important variable of all: how we feel, right here, right now.
What if we tried to flip the script? What if, instead of letting an external device tell us how hard to go, we learned once again to listen to the signals our body has always been sending us? This approach not only exists, but it also has a scientific basis. It’s called training based on the rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and it’s the first step to becoming not just a stronger runner, but a more mindful athlete.
What Is the RPE Scale and How to “Calibrate” It to Your Sensations
The RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) Scale is not a new-age invention, but a scientific tool developed in the 1970s by the Swedish psychologist Gunnar Borg to subjectively measure the intensity of physical effort. The simplest and most intuitive version is a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the effort of sitting on the couch and 10 is an all-out sprint where you feel you can’t take another step.
Training with RPE means associating each type of workout with a number on this scale. Instead of thinking, “today I have to run 10 km at a 5:30 min/km pace,” you’ll think, “today I have to run 10 km at an RPE of 4.”
The beauty of this method? It’s a self-regulating system. On a day when you’re full of energy, your “RPE 4” might correspond to a 5:20 pace. On a day when you’re tired and fatigued, the same “RPE 4” might be a 5:45. And that’s perfectly fine. You are doing exactly the right workout for what your body can handle on that day, not what a cold number dictated.
A Practical Guide: How to Use RPE for Your Workouts
“Calibrating” your scale takes a bit of practice. At first, use your watch as confirmation, associating your usual paces with how you feel. After a few weeks, it will become an automatic process.
The Easy Run (RPE 3-4): The Conversational Zone
- How it feels: The effort is very light. Your breathing is deep and controlled. You could hold a continuous conversation without any shortness of breath. This is your classic “recovery run” or the majority of your long run.
- The goal: To build aerobic endurance and promote recovery without accumulating stress.
The Medium Run (RPE 5-6): The Controlled Effort
- How it feels: The effort becomes noticeable, “comfortably hard.” Your breathing gets deeper, and you can speak, but only in short, broken sentences, no longer in fluid conversations.
- The goal: This is the zone for your Tempo Runs or the middle part of a progression run. It improves your ability to sustain a fast pace for a prolonged period, raising your lactate threshold.
The Fast Run (RPE 7-9): When It Starts to Hurt
- How it feels: The fatigue is decidedly high. Your breathing is deep and powerful, and you can’t utter more than one or two words. Your focus is entirely on the effort.
- RPE 7: The start of a long interval (e.g., 1000m) or the final stages of a 10k race.
- RPE 8-9: The heart of a short interval session or the finish of a 5k race.
- The goal: To increase your top-end speed and your ability to tolerate lactic acid. RPE 10 is reserved for the final sprint to the finish line.
The 3 Big Advantages of Learning to Run “by Feel”
- It prevents overtraining: This is the biggest benefit. RPE forces you to be honest. If your body is tired, it will send a signal of higher effort at the same pace, “forcing” you to slow down and respect its needs. It’s a foolproof safety system.
- It develops deep self-awareness: You learn to decode your body’s language. You understand the difference between laziness and real fatigue, between a fleeting discomfort and the start of an injury. You become your own coach.
- It makes you a better racer: Races are never run on perfectly flat terrain or in ideal conditions. Those who rely solely on their GPS fall apart at the first hill or gust of wind. Those who run by feel instinctively know how to modulate their pace to maintain the correct effort, managing their energy much more intelligently and effectively.
The ultimate goal isn’t to throw away your sportwatch—far from it. It’s a valuable ally for collecting data and monitoring progress over time. The goal is to put it back in its proper place: as a tool at your service, not your master. Because your watch can tell you how fast you’re going, but only you can feel how hard you’ve really worked.