Rating effort honestly

The question is how many you had left

Effort is not how unpleasant the set was, how out of breath you are, or how much you disliked it. The question it is standing in for is simpler: at the moment you racked it, how many more good reps could you have done?

Two or three left is a hard working set. One left is close to the limit. None left means the next rep was not happening, which is a different kind of set and should be rare.

Three ways it goes wrong

All three produce a log that reads fine and advises badly:

• Everything is the same number. If every set for a month is an eight, the field has stopped carrying information and the review has nothing to read.
• Rating the exercise instead of the set. The fifth set is not as easy as the first, and recording them identically hides exactly the thing that shows fatigue.
• Rating how you feel about it. A movement you dislike feels harder than it was; one you enjoy feels easier. Both push the number away from the reps you had left.

Why the coach needs it

Weight and reps alone cannot tell the difference between a set that moved easily and one that nearly failed. Same numbers, very different information about what should happen next week.

This is what stops progression being arithmetic. Finishing at the top of a range with three reps in reserve means the load should move. Finishing at the top with nothing left means it should not, whatever the spreadsheet would say.

Being wrong is fine, being consistent matters

Nobody rates effort accurately at first, and precision is not the point. What matters is that your eight means roughly the same thing in January and in March, because the useful signal is the trend rather than the number.

The same session feeling like less work over a few weeks, at the same load, is one of the clearest signs of progress there is. It only exists if you were honest both times.