WorkoutSmart programs
are designed with autoregulation in mind. Autoregulation simply means that you help control how your program progresses. This is done with the feedback you provide. Your feedback is specific to you and ultimately depends on how you respond and recover from training. Recovery depends on many things including the workout itself, daily stress levels, sleep quality, nutrition, hydration quality, and active recovery techniques like massage and foam rolling. Adjustments are made when you complete your workout and will affect all subsequent workouts.
Here is a look at the three types of feedback we track and use to adjust your program:
RPE– Rate of Perceived Exertion for a single exercise. We wanted this one to be pretty simple! It’s for those of you who don’t want to make a lot of specific changes to the sets, reps, or weight listed on your program. All you have to do is let us know if the exercise was Too Easy, Just Right or Too Hard. This gives us the “big picture” and we make adjustments accordingly. For example: The amount we adjust your program depends on the Difficulty Level for that particular week. If it was a Very Easy week and your feedback was still “too hard” we would make a larger adjustment than if it was a Very Hard week with a “too hard” rating.
SRWA– Set, Rep and Weight Adjustments. Making changes to the actual sets, reps or weight of the exercises on your program is another way of providing feedback. This is great for the more advanced user who is familiar with how their body responds to fatigue when training with different set and rep combinations. For example: If you can do more weight on the “work set” (the heaviest set) than what your program calls for, just click on the SRWA icon and put in what you did. We will track this and increase the weight the next time that exercise appears on your program. Some workouts will ask you to perform as many reps as possible (AMRAP) on the Very Hard weeks for certain exercises. This is a “workout test” and when you give us this feedback, we track it and adjust your program to match your performance levels.
SRPE– Session Rate of Perceived Exertion. This feedback lets us know how hard the overall training session was for you. This appears when you indicate you have completed your workout.
Hit the drop down arrow for the Session Rate of Perceived Exertion scale and choose how the workout felt to you. We are currently developing our Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio screen to help guide your workout volumes and intensities as you progress through your training schedule. Providing this feedback not only gives us insight about the workout but also provides you with the big picture of your training volumes and intensities.
Providing RPE, SRWA and or SRPE feedback is ultimately up to you, your experience level or even just how much you like to tinker with your program! You can simply use the RPE feedback and your program will be adapted to your recovery and progression needs. Alternatively, you can track your adjustments and progressions in a more granular way by providing specific SRWA and SRPE feedback. One way isn’t necessarily better or worse than the other. The important thing is simply to provide the feedback!
Additional Tools
In addition to the feedback tools listed above we also have our “smart” Power Up!, Express it! and Exercise Exchange tools. This brings the autoregulation process full circle. These tools are not specifically feedback based but we wanted a way for you to completely dial in your program based on energy levels, time and schedule availability, exchanging exercises or even deleting an exercise for that week.
The Smart Tools listed below allow you to make adjustments to your workout as a whole. Clicking on them will increase or decrease the total supplementary or assistance exercise volume (sets, reps, time, calories burned) for that day, not just for a specific exercise. Try it out, you can always just hit the Reset Workout button if you change your mind!
If you would like to make specific or individual exercise adjustments (instead of whole workout changes explained above) just click on the pencil icon. This is the Individual Exercise Adjustment Icon and it is available for each exercise that supports adjustments. 
The Power Up! button associated with this icon adds a set to the exercise routine. However, it automatically scans the routine and duplicates the heaviest set in the routine instead of adding a warmup or lighter drop set. The Express! button will remove the last set in a routine. This will reduce the overall difficulty of a routine.