RPE stopped being an observation once it started setting the weight

A rating that determines tomorrow's session is no longer a neutral report on how today felt.

The scale was designed as a description. Someone finishes a set, you ask how hard it was, they say eight, you write down eight. Nothing hangs on it. The number is a window into a state.

Then autoregulation arrived and the number acquired consequences. Say eight and the load goes up next week. Say ten and it comes down, or the session gets cut, or a conversation happens with the medical staff. Now the athlete is not describing an internal state, he is choosing an outcome, and it would be strange if that did not change what he says.

It changes it in both directions, which is what makes it hard to correct for. The athlete who wants to be picked on Saturday underrates everything. The one who is quietly overtrained and wants permission to back off will find that a nine gets him permission, and a nine is easy to produce. Neither is dishonest in any way I would want to accuse someone of. They are answering the real question, which is no longer how hard was that but what do I want to happen next.

There is a further wrinkle in group settings. Ratings collected in a room where teammates can hear the answers regress towards each other within weeks. Nobody wants to be the one saying ten after a session everybody else called a seven. The between-athlete variance shrinks, the data looks tidier, and a monitoring lead may read that tightening as evidence the squad has become better calibrated. It is the opposite. It is social pressure compressing the scale.

I do not think this makes the rating worthless. It makes it a joint product of physiology and incentive, and the useful move is to stop pretending otherwise. Collect it privately, on a phone, before anyone has seen anyone else's answer. Keep the person reading the ratings separate from the person selecting the team, and say out loud that the separation exists.

And accept that a season-long trend, in a squad where the ratings drive the plan, describes the relationship between athletes and staff at least as much as it describes fatigue.

That is not a failure of the scale. It is what happens to any measurement once you start paying for the answer.