A high-level picture of psychological training load for runners

This is the third article in my series on unpacking what runners mean when they talk about “training load.” The first two articles covered physiological training load and biomechanical training load. Today, we will turn our attention to the fascinating, subjective, and little-studied topic of psychological training load.

What is psychological training load? Put briefly, psychological training load describes the mental and emotional effects of training—both in terms of your short-term cognitive state and your longer-term psychological orientation.

Proper psychological training load drives motivation: both in the short-term sense of ability to summon a maximal effort and endure fatigue in a workout or race, and the long-term ability to believe in yourself, believe in your training, and believe in what you can achieve.

This discussion is going to be much more philosophical than the previous two articles. We’ll cover the quantitative side first, but I’m much more interested in broader and more expansive views on athlete psychology than you typically see discussed in the scientific literature.

Tellingly, when you hear great coaches discuss their training approach, they often put quite a lot of emphasis on the psychological side of things.^[1] My own experience is similar: much of the work I do as a coach is managing athlete psychology and mindset—figuring out how to do the workouts, as well as what workouts to do.

RPE as a quantitative approach to psychological training load

There is one shining example of a quantitative approach that is, at the very least, closely related to psychological training load, and that’s RPE—rating of perceived exertion.^[2]

The formal exercise science version of RPE is the Borg scale, which is a qualitative scale that ranges from 6–20 and is presented alongside descriptors like this:

Why 6–20? Well, the motivation was that you could multiply the Borg RPE to get an approximation of heart rate. Unsurprisingly that conversion does not actually work very well, but the strange 6–20 scale persists nonetheless.

So, even though classical RPE clearly has subjective aspects that are related to your psychological state, one of the original purposes of the RPE scale was to draw a connection between psychological training load and physiological training load.^[3] That way, you could use the Borg RPE scale as a fast and cheap replacement for a heart rate monitor or a blood lactate meter.

There is also a “modified Borg scale” which is, essentially, the 0–10 scale you are probably more familiar with (and that I personally find much more natural).^[4] Even that scale is typically presented with various qualifiers that seem awkward or unnatural in modern American English, but in exercise science research, people tend to stick with it since they don’t want to go to the trouble of validating their own scale.

Session RPE as a psychological training load metric

One thing to remember about classical RPE is that it’s intended to be used as an instantaneous measure of effort – essentially asking “how hard are you working right now?” That characteristic of RPE is precisely what you want if you’re looking for a subjective version of a blood lactate measure. But it’s not a desirable characteristic for training load. For that purpose, we need something approximating an integrated sum of your RPE across a workout.

Fortunately, modern exercise science research provides just such a tool: session RPE. First proposed in a 2001 paper by Carl Foster and others as a way of quantifying “mean session intensity,” the standard session RPE assessment is very simple: athletes are asked “How was your workout?” and presented with the adjusted RPE scale below (which follows the Borg scale but modernizes some of the language). 

After the athlete rates how hard the workout was overall, that rating (from zero to 10) is multiplied by the duration of the session in minutes. For example, a 30 min fast continuous run at 90% 5k pace which the athlete rates as an “8/10 difficulty” equals a training load of 30 x 8 = 240 arbitrary units (often abbreviated a.u.).

Session RPE is very popular in sports like soccer, basketball, and rugby, where there’s no obvious objective metric of training load (vs. mileage, yardage, energy expenditure, etc.) and where training can be highly intermittent. Usually the “ground truth” in studies that examine session RPE in these kinds of sports is some objective metric of physiological training load, such as TRIMP from heart rate monitors.

An aside: Do traditional RPE scales get too hard too early?

The layout and the labeling of the Foster RPE scale mostly copies the layout used for the Borg scale for understandable reasons. My coach’s-eye-perspective is that the RPE scale’s labels are too “compressed” in the middle.

Calling a 5/10 effort a "hard workout" seems a little much for me, and keeping only one point of gradation between easy, moderate, and somewhat hard doesn’t feel expressive enough. But that might just be my particular subjective skew.

When I designed the qualitative descriptors for the overall difficulty ratings in the Marathon Excellence training plans, I opted for the range below, “expanding” the middle of difficulty ratings and compressing the top—though importantly, I don’t consider these to be equally-spaced: psychologically, the jump from 5/10 to 6/10 is much smaller than the jump from 8/10 to 9/10, and likewise for going from 9/10 to 10/10. 

(Note that "MEE"-style difficulty ratings are perfectly acceptable as decimals; some workouts have a target difficulty of 7.5/10, for example)

I provided these more detailed descriptors not so much to say “here is the official version of what 7/10 means,” but to give the reader an idea of “here’s what I mean when I say 7/10.”

When you think about it, it’s not that surprising that a 7/10 workout for one person might mean something very different even in subjective terms for someone else—people have different “setpoints” and different subjective experiences, and maybe even different sensitivities to fatigue (a useful analogy here might be spicy food “hotness” ratings – different restaurants have very different opinions on what constitutes “3/5” spiciness!).^[5]

I am actually cooking up an empirical survey that I will send to my email list (join here if you aren’t on it already!) to get an idea of how various subjective descriptors (“hard”, “easy”, “maximal”, etc.) map to an unlabeled zero-to-ten scale, and how closely spaced (or not) each increment is. That project will give a better scale of running-specific descriptors of effort. I’ll write an article about the results.

Session RPE versus overall difficulty for psychological training load

If you want just one “global” metric that captures both physiological training load and some of the subjective aspects of psychological training load, session RPE is great—it’s simple, free, and scalable to team settings, various types of workouts, etc.

However, one of the recurring themes in this article series is that it can be useful to separate out the various types of training load. In running, at least, we already have great ways to track physiological training load, like mileage or volume in different zones/domains of intensity.

What if you want to separate out the psychological demands of a workout? For this purpose, I really like just taking the overall workout difficulty, and not accounting for volume at all. In some sense, this overall difficulty (on a 0–10 scale) already bakes in the fact that running at a certain effort level for a longer duration makes the workout harder.^[6]

For instance, running at 90% MP for 30 minutes is quite a manageable session—maybe a 3–4/10, something you could tack on as a secondary double the day before a real workout. But doing 120 minutes at the same pace would be much more challenging! That’d be a full-fledged long fast run, and probably at least a 7/10 difficulty session.

This overall difficulty approach also captures the fact that what seems to matter most about a workout’s psychological load is not how long it is, but how much focus and how much discomfort it involves. Some very short sessions can be quite intense, while a longer session that might have a higher session RPE may be far less psychologically demanding on the whole. 

For example, consider the two following sessions: 

🗓️ 4 km continuous on the track at 98% 5k pace = 12 minutes at 9/10 difficulty = 108 au session RPE

🗓️ 16 km continuous at 80% 5k effort on rolling dirt roads = 56 minutes at 6/10 difficulty = 392 au session RPE

From a purely psychological perspective, the first session is going to be a lot more demanding—it will require getting more “psyched up,” it will feel more mentally draining, and will take longer before you feel ready to push hard in another workout.

I think these aspects are better captured simply by the overall difficulty, as long as you also track the differences in the other kinds of training load as well (4 km vs 16 km of volume, for example). 

The philosophical side of psychological training load

In the two examples above, I smuggled in a few additional properties that I believe affect the psychological training load of a session. These include where you do the workout and how focused you are on pace versus effort. For example, imagine doing the following two variants of the first workout from above: 

🗓️ 4 km continuous on the track at 98% 5k pace, checking splits every 400m

🗓️ 12 minutes over cross-country terrain at 98% 5k effort, not checking watch at all

It’s very possible you could average the same heart rate and incur essentially the same physiological training load in both sessions, but for most runners, the first session is much more psychologically demanding.

For that reason, I think it's important to consider closely the aspects of your training that affect psychological load, independent of other forms of training load.

Here are some factors that I think modulate psychological training load, beyond their physiological or biomechanical effects:

Factors that increase the psychological training load of workouts

• Running on the track
• Checking splits often
• Checking other metrics like heart rate
• Running according to pace
• External life stress (work, family, school, relationship, etc.)
• High-precision pacing (e.g. alternating 1200m at 90% 5k, 400m at 80% 5k)
• Long repeats at high intensity (e.g. 3 km continuous at 10k pace, vs. 1 km continuous)
• Long, uninterrupted runs at a high intensity (e.g. 20 mi / 32 km at 95% MP, or 15 mi / 25 km at 80% 5k)
• Running alone (for some runners)
• Unexpected or dangerous workout interruptions (traffic, road crossings, loose dogs)
• Dealing with nagging injuries
• Workout uncertainty (e.g. the coach saying “let’s do 4 x 1k at 5k pace, then afterwards I’ll tell you what we are doing next”)
• Running in difficult conditions (wind, rain, cold, heat)
• High expectations for a workout (e.g. doing 16 mi at marathon pace as a “dress rehearsal” for the race)

Factors that decrease the psychological training load of workouts

• Running on cross-country terrain or dirt roads
• Running in a scenic and peaceful location
• Ignoring your watch
• Running according to effort
• Running by time, instead of running by distance (e.g. 7 x 4 min, vs. 7 x 1 km)
• Progressive, “cut-down” style workouts
• Running at an optimal time of day for you (morning for morning people, afternoon/evening for night owls)
• Loose pacing constraints (e.g. 20 km moderate through hills at 70–80% 5k pace)
• Running with friends or teammates
• Running in good conditions (calm day, clear skies, not too hot)
• Wearing super shoes (even beyond their physical benefits)
• Improvising according to feel during the workout (e.g. a Kenyan-style progression run or a Swedish-style fartlek with little or no externally imposed structure)

These are mostly based on my observations as a coach, and might not be true for all runners (I coach a few milers who hate cross-country terrain!). You could probably make a list of your own as well.

These factors give you many useful levers for adjusting the psychological training load of a session, even if you have certain physiological and biomechanical training load constraints you are trying to hit. 

You can see some examples in the training schedules for Athlete A and Athlete C in my article on sub-70 half marathon training—both of them were coming off marathon races, and after a marathon, mental recovery is even more important than physical recovery.

That’s why the first few weeks of training use many cut-down workouts, progression runs, effort-based fartleks, and workouts on cross-country terrain to limit their psychological training load and foster regeneration of mental energy.

Draining and regenerating psychological energy

Managing your psychological training load is a critical component of maintaining your motivation—both short-term, in the sense of being ready to push very hard in a tough workout or a race, and also long-term, in the John L. Parker Jr. sense of “marshalling your ambition” over weeks, months, and even years of training.

Quite often, when runners think they are “overtrained,” their physiological and biomechanical training load aren’t all that unusual, but they’ve completely depleted their psychological energy reserves by doing too much training in a state of high psychological training load: hard track workouts, precisely paced road sessions, training solo early in the morning or late at night, and doing little to regenerate their psychological energy levels.

Looking at their self-reported difficulty ratings for their workouts usually reveals a long string of 9–10/10 sessions.

Psychological training load is interesting because it’s very possible to create workouts that actively regenerate psychological energy, instead of draining it.

Easy runs with friends in a scenic location, for example, will often leave you feeling more motivated to train hard than you were beforehand, so it might even be correct to think of some sessions as having a restorative effect on your psychological load—essentially, a “negative training load.”

I don’t have a great way of quantifying these more philosophical aspects of psychological training load, but I do think it’s absolutely worth factoring into your training approach.

It’s not at all surprising that teams and geographic areas that crank out tons of great runners have a lot of factors pushing in the direction of making it easy to train hard.

Practical strategies for managing psychological training load

The simplest thing you can do to monitor your psychological training load is to start tracking your overall workout difficulty. A simple 0 to 10 rating in your training log is probably the easiest way to do it.^[7]

By comparing your overall difficulty against how you feel day to day, you’ll get a better feel for both where your psychological training load is at and what your “load tolerance” looks like—some people can grind out more tough sessions than others. 

If you have a training plan that explicitly provides workout difficulty or RPE targets (like the examples here from Marathon Excellence), it’s very useful to compare your actual difficulty / RPE against the target difficulty or target RPE of the workout. If there’s a big discrepancy, that either means your training paces are off, or your overall psychological energy reserves are getting depleted.

Another useful strategy is to periodize your workout difficulty. All physiology aside, it’s not sustainable to do very tough workouts year-round. Some people respond to this fact by avoiding hard workouts entirely: they just do low-key, moderate-difficulty sessions week after week. Sometimes they get reasonably good results, but if you want to reach your best, you do need to push very hard—sometimes. 

The right way to thread this needle is to start a training cycle with a relatively “flat” difficulty distribution, keeping workouts moderately challenging on a consistent basis.

Then, as you get into your race-specific training, you start doing some workouts at a higher difficulty level (ideally, your most important race-specific sessions) while also increasing the amount of rest, recovery, and regenerative sessions (including regenerative workouts) afterwards.

This strategy is essentially Renato Canova’s idea of “modulation”—pairing a big stress with big recovery—just viewed from a psychological perspective.

I think this idea of psychological modulation is part of why periodization is useful in the first place: long, fast workouts are essential for running your best, but if you continue doing them week after week, you’ll eventually start depleting your mental energy reserves because the psychological training load is very high.

So, after several weeks of tough training and racing, you need to return to a base of low- to moderate-difficulty workouts for several weeks to a few months to regenerate your mental energy and motivation. 

Lastly, another major goal should be to orient your long-term training strategy towards increasing your psychological training load tolerance over time. This is a gradual process: you don’t just get to decide today that you are going to become able to train very hard week after week.

You need to gradually expose yourself to progressively more and tougher training—longer, faster, more challenging workouts that you've never done before—over the course of months and years, respecting the principles of stress and recovery (both in terms of physical and mental recovery).

In the quote below, Renato Canova talks about this process in the context of marathon training, but the same ideas apply to other events too:^[8]

Long easy runs are never a problem for specialists of 10,000m who want to move to the marathon, but the ability to run for a long time at a high level of intensity is a process needing several years, and that’s the main reason why many top athletes are older than 35 years.

In my group, for example, Tadesse Abraham this year won Barcelona in 2:05:01 and is 44 years old. In training, when we go for long run (between 35 and 40 km), he's the one showing the higher mental adaptation to the distance, while he suffers during fast tests on the track, but without this training of specific speed [...] he was not able to run better than 2:06:40 even 8 years ago.^[9]

Someone asked me recently what I thought the most controversial or iconoclastic thing in Marathon Excellence was, and I responded, mostly seriously, that it was my recommendation that you do at least some of your long runs alone, through challenging terrain, without listening to music or podcasts.

Why? Because this is exactly how you build the ability to focus during long, tough workouts and races.

Recap

The concept of psychological training load helps capture the mental aspects of training—why certain workouts and training approaches feel invigorating, while others feel draining.

Psychological training load is a major driver behind motivation, both in the short-term sense of being able to push very hard in a workout or race, and in the long-term sense of being able to commit yourself to many months of tough training to achieve your goals.

The easiest way to start thinking about psychological training load is to start tracking your overall workout difficulty on a 0-10 scale. Once you start tracking difficulty, it’s much easier to develop good intuitions on what level of psychological load you can handle. 

When planning out your training, don’t forget to periodize workout difficulty as well as the physiological aspects of training. Throughout the season, you want to progress from mostly doing moderate-difficulty sessions early on to doing bigger, tougher, more psychologically challenging sessions later in the season, then using more rest, recovery, and regenerative workouts to restore mental energy reserves.

There are many “levers” you can use to adjust the psychological load of workouts, even while getting more or less the same physiological and biomechanical training load. Mentally challenging workouts tend to be long, precisely paced, and rigidly-structured; mentally refreshing workouts tend to be effort-based, on scenic routes, and allow for more flexibility or spontaneity.

Finally, you should set a goal of increasing your ability to tolerate high psychological training loads as you progress through your career. As you become more experienced, you should aim to increase your ability to do long, tough, mentally demanding sessions—but you can’t rush this process; it can take many years to build this ability. 

Learn more about training

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to my email list below! It’s the best way to find out when I’ve got a new article on training, exercise science, or when I have another new web app coming out.

I also have a new book out, Marathon Excellence for Everyone, which applies many of these principles to marathon training (and includes target difficulty ratings for all workouts!) .

Learn more about Marathon Excellence here, or get the book on Amazon.

If you live outside of the United States, Marathon Excellence is also available in a Metric Edition with all workouts in kilometers!

If you're not training for the marathon, you might enjoy my 2013 book, Modern Training & Physiology, which is a short and simple overview of scientifically based training for the 800m to the 10k.

Footnotes

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^[1] Famed American coach Joe Vigil would philosophize so much his Adams State athletes called his pre-workout comments “lessons in Vigilosophy.” Vigil’s contemporary and friend Joe Newton (famous in his own right for his championship high school teams) dedicates only a few dozen pages in his two books to actual training schedules; the rest is focused on team-building, motivation, rules for life, and logistics. And of course Renato Canova is unparalleled as a source of coaching philosophy condensed into proverbs and aphorisms.  

^[2] RPE is often mis-quoted as being “rate of perceived exertion”, or “rating of perceived effort.” These differences do matter: a rate of exertion implies something more instantaneous and transient, and “effort” implies something more subjective and comprehensive than “exertion.” When I talk about “effort” in the general case I’m intentionally talking about something broader and more subjective than just RPE.

^[3] Indeed, the way RPE scales are often “validated” is by comparing them to something objective, like heart rate, blood lactate, or oxygen consumption. But for the subjective aspects of effort, there can’t be any external criterion metric—just like there’s no way to externally validate how happy or sad or angry someone is feeling: it’s a subjective experience!

^[4] As with the Borg 6–20 scale, the original modified Borg “category ratio scale” (“CR10”) also has a strange construction. It starts at zero, the next increment is 0.5, then 1, 2, … up to 10. Ten is labeled “maximal” but there is an additional level above maximal—yes, it really “goes to eleven.” Also, speaking of eleven, canonically correct RPE scales should go from zero to ten, not one out of ten (even if zero is “resting”). The reason is so that “5/10” is actually in the middle of the scale—on a 1–10 scale, the midpoint is actually 5.5.  But if you define "zero" as "resting" it's not really a big deal.

^[5] I would be remiss not to mention that there are statistical approaches, like mixed effects ordinal regression models, that can explicitly model the fact that different people have a different “baseline” for various RPE levels, as well as accounting for the fact that different increments (e.g. going from 5/10 to 6/10 vs. from 9/10 to 10/10) might not represent equal jumps in psychological effort.

^[6] This is mostly overcautiousness from my academic days but I’m careful to use the term “overall difficulty” here as opposed to “RPE” since my 0–10 difficulty scale is not an RPE in the Borg scale sense.

^[7]  Some watches (e.g. more recent Garmin models) actually have an integrated post-workout RPE rating but it’s not treated as a “first class” training metric by the Garmin Connect dashboard.

^[8] An example from 5k training: two workouts that are very helpful, but also very mentally challenging, are long fast runs at 80% 5k pace and long repeats at 95% 5k pace. For a competitive 5k runner in the prime of their career, I would like to see them able to do 15 mi / 25 km at 80% 5k pace, through good-sized rolling hills, about 6-8 weeks out from a big 5k race. And I’d also like to see them able to do a workout like 3 x 3 km at 95% 5k, or even 4-3-2-1k at 95 >> 100% 5k pace, 3–4 weeks out from the race. But both of those sessions are too psychologically draining for a high schooler to be doing: long repeats and long fast runs are especially mentally demanding, so athletes need to be very mentally strong—not simply physically fit—to be able to do these kinds of sessions and benefit from them/

^[9] I have made a few very minor grammar corrections to this quote. Subsequently, Tadesse Abraham ran 2:04:40 in Valencia to set the Swiss national record.

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