How to monitor player load in basketball with RPE

RPE stands for rating of perceived exertion: how hard a player felt a session was, on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is rest and 10 is the hardest effort imaginable. It comes from the Borg scale, and it has one great advantage over heart-rate straps and GPS vests. It costs nothing and works on every player in the squad.

The number is subjective, and that is the point. Two players can run the same drills and feel very different sessions, and the difference is exactly what a coach wants to see.

A widely used method multiplies the rating by the length of the session in minutes. The result is called session load, measured in arbitrary units. It is not a physiological number, but it lets you compare a hard short session with an easy long one.

Adding up the sessions of a week gives a weekly load. The useful question is rarely how big it is, but how it compares with the weeks around it.

• Ask soon after, if you can. An answer within half an hour of the session is the most precise.
• Ask the next morning if you cannot. It is less exact, but it is far more likely to be answered, and consistency beats precision.
• Keep it to one question. A rating from 0 to 10, plus a way to say there was no session.
• Pair it with a few more. Sleep, soreness, energy and mood tell you why a rating is high.

This is how the check-in in HoopSync's wellness tracking is built: a short form on the player's own phone, opened from a team QR code with no account to create.

• Sudden jumps in weekly load. A week much heavier than the ones before it is the classic set-up for an overload. Many coaches use roughly ten percent as a rough guardrail, though the evidence for any exact figure is weak, so treat it as a prompt to look, not a rule.
• A high rating with poor sleep. The combination matters more than either alone.
• A player against their own average. Comparing players with each other says little; a player drifting from their own normal says a lot.
• The same pain area, week after week. One sore knee is nothing; five in a row deserves a conversation.
• Very low ratings for hard sessions. Sometimes a player is not being honest, or has stopped paying attention.

Adolescents are a special case, because their load interacts with growth, school and sleep. Sleep guidance for teenagers is generally eight to ten hours, and most do not get it, which makes the sleep question one of the more useful in the check-in.

Two cautions. Teenagers sometimes give the answer they think the coach wants, so it helps to be visibly unbothered by a bad number. And for teams based in the United States, the player side of HoopSync is closed to players under 13 and to under-13 age groups (COPPA), so there this method suits older youth and senior squads.

• RPE is self-reported. It reflects how a player feels, which is useful and imperfect.
• It says nothing about the kind of load: fifty jumps and fifty minutes of running can share a number.
• It is not a medical tool. A player who reports pain still needs a professional, not an algorithm.

• After each session, players rate it from their phones.
• On Monday, the coach spends ten minutes reading the week: total load, who is out of pattern, who reported pain.
• Adjust the coming week if needed: shorten a session, split a group, rest one player.
• Say something to the squad about what you saw, so that filling it in is visibly worth it.

Here is how the numbers read for a squad training four times a week. The figures are the weekly totals of RPE multiplied by minutes.

The jump in week three is not necessarily a problem. A tournament weekend or a cup game can explain it. It is a prompt to look at the sleep scores, the soreness reports and the player who is already complaining about a knee, and to decide whether next week should give some of it back.

The point of the table is the comparison with the weeks around it. A load of 2,600 means nothing on its own; it means a lot after a week of 1,950.