reckonerAlmost everybody rates a set on how much it hurt. The bar felt heavy, your heart rate was up, the last rep was ugly, so the number goes up. That is a rating of your afternoon rather than a rating of the set, and it is the reason effort ratings have a reputation for being useless.
The question is narrower than that, and much easier to answer honestly.
It is a count, not a feeling
The scale runs from six to ten and every number on it is a count of what you left behind. A ten is nothing left: the bar stopped, or it would have on the next one. A nine is one more rep. An eight is two. A seven is three, and a six is four, at which point you are warming up rather than working.
That is the whole of it. It is not a score out of ten, it is not a measure of how much you sweated, and there is no credit for a big number. Two people can put the same weight on the same bar for the same reps and honestly report different ratings, and they should, because the question is about them and not about the bar.
The number is not how it felt. It is what you left.
The last set, at the moment it ended
Rate the last set of that lift, not the average of the lot and not the session. The earlier sets were done with more in the tank by design, so pooling them tells you nothing about where the lift actually finished.
And rate it standing there, before you have walked to the water fountain and decided you had another one in you. The estimate is best in the ten seconds after the set. It gets braver every minute after that.
What Reckoner does with the number
This is the real engine, run against a lifter on the same bench press at the same weight, finishing the top of the rep range every week. Watch the first row and the third. Same lift, same bar, same reps finished, and opposite answers, with the rating the only thing that differs.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Holding steady 60 kgThe last set came in at RPE 10, which is two over target. Grinding is a recovery signal, so nothing is added. |
| 2 | 4 x 10 at 60 kg | Backed off 40% of sets offYou have been over target on chest for two trained weeks, so Reckoner backs off now rather than waiting for the block to do it. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 3 | 2 x 10 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running reckoner/engine.py when this page was generated.
In the first row the reps were all there and the effort was over target, so nothing is added. Grinding out the top of a range is not the same achievement as owning it, and the engine treats it as a recovery signal rather than a green light. In the third row the same lift at the same weight comes in comfortably, and the bar moves. That row is the lighter week, so there are two sets of it rather than four, and the rating is still what decides the answer.
The middle row is what happens when a hard number keeps arriving. Once a muscle group has averaged more than one point over target for two trained weeks, Reckoner backs that group off now rather than waiting for the block to come round to it: about 40 per cent of the sets come off, and the load and the reps stay exactly where you earned them.
Your target is not one number
Every lift carries its own target and it is printed beside the lift. The heavy anchors at the top of a day are reckoned against two reps in reserve, because that is where you can hold a position and repeat a week. The accessories underneath run one closer to the edge, because a set of curls near the end is cheap to recover from and there is nothing to lose control of.
Your first week holds everything to the anchors' target, accessories included, while Reckoner works out what you can lift. Nothing runs closer to the edge than that on loads that are still a guess.
Four ways the number goes wrong
Rating the day instead of the set
A bad night, a skipped lunch and a late train do not change how many reps were left in the tank. If the set was genuinely there, it was there. Log the readiness question if you woke up rough, because that is the place the engine wants to hear about your day.
Being brave with it
Shading a hard set down because a high number feels like an admission is the costliest mistake here, and it is the commonest. The engine believes you, adds weight you cannot hold, and next week is worse. An honest hard number buys you a lighter week, which is the thing you actually wanted.
Calling a grind something other than the top of the scale
If the bar slowed to a crawl and the next rep was not happening, that is the top of the scale, whatever the plan asked for. Reckoner adds nothing at the top of the scale, deliberately, and that is the answer you want on a day that went like that.
Rating it from memory
Logging four lifts on the train home turns four counts into one impression of the session, and the impression is always shaped by whichever set was worst. Rate each lift as you finish it, in the gym.
None of this asks you to be precise. Nobody knows whether they had one and a half reps left, and the engine is not built on the assumption that they do. It asks you to be honest about roughly how close you came, every week, in the same way, which is a much smaller ask and is the only input it cannot get from anywhere else.