Client Effort is a simple 1-5 rating your clients log at the end of every workout. It tells you how hard the session actually felt to them. Training Load combines that rating with the session duration to produce a single number that tracks stress across days, weeks, and months.
Together, they answer two questions you could never quite answer before:
How hard did that session feel for my client?
Is my client's overall training stress trending up, down, or flat?
Everything in this article covers what the feature does, how to turn it on, where coaches and clients see it, and the math behind the numbers.
Why this matters
Coaching decisions are only as good as the data behind them. Effort and Load fill a gap that reps, sets, weights, and time cap never could: the subjective experience of the session.
Effort is the signal that a workout hit harder or easier than the prescription implied. Same program, same weights, very different day? Effort makes that visible.
Load compounds those single-session signals into a longitudinal picture. A week of high-load sessions followed by a planned deload is obvious on the chart. A client creeping into overreaching territory is obvious on the chart. A client who is chronically under-stimulated is obvious on the chart.
Neither number replaces coach judgment. Both give you context you would otherwise have to chase down in comments or DMs.
The 1-5 Effort Scale
Clients rate every completed session on a simple 1-5 scale.
Rating | Label | What it feels like |
1 | Easy | Comfortable throughout. Could have done a lot more. |
2 | Moderate | Some work, but under control. Could have pushed harder. |
3 | Challenging | A real session. Left the gym tired but not wrecked. |
4 | Hard | Had to dig. A few reps or intervals were a grind. |
5 | All-Out | Emptied the tank. Could not have done more. |
ℹ️ Why 1-5 and not 1-10?
Research-grade training load tools use the 1-10 Rate of Perceived Exertion scale (Foster's session-RPE method). That scale is excellent for trained athletes and sport scientists. It is noisy for the general population. The difference between a "6" and a "7" is hard for most clients to report consistently from one workout to the next, which pollutes the load trend.
A 5-point scale is something every client can use reliably. One descriptor per rating. No guessing. The math behind the load calculation then maps each 1-5 rating onto the RPE range so the final Load number remains congruent with sRPE-based load research.
How Training Load is calculated
Every logged session produces a single Load number using this formula:
Load = (Effort × 2 − 0.5) × Duration (in minutes)
The (Effort × 2 − 0.5) piece maps the 1-5 client scale onto an RPE-equivalent multiplier that sits inside the classic 1-10 sRPE range. Multiplying by duration gives you arbitrary load units that behave the same way sRPE-based training load units behave in the literature: comparable within a client, trackable over time, responsive to both intensity and volume.
Worked out across the scale:
Effort | Label | RPE-equivalent multiplier | Load for a 45-min session |
1 | Easy | 1.5 | 68 |
2 | Moderate | 3.5 | 158 |
3 | Challenging | 5.5 | 248 |
4 | Hard | 7.5 | 338 |
5 | All-Out | 9.5 | 428 |
A few implications worth knowing:
Longer + harder = more load. A 60-minute Effort 4 session (450 units) produces more stress than a 30-minute Effort 5 session (285 units).
Load on its own is meaningless. Load over time is powerful. A single session's load number in isolation is just a number. The same number on a 4-week chart tells you whether this client is ramping, holding, or backing off.
Consistency beats precision. If a client rates the same way across sessions, the trend is honest. It does not need to be calibrated to anyone else's scale.
What clients see
1. Rating a session at completion
When a client finishes a workout in the app, they see a short post-session flow before the session closes out.
Then they rate their effort, enter the training duration, and can comment on the session for a richer feedback loop.
2. Seeing their own trends
Clients see their Training Load on the Trends tab in the mobile app. Same colored bar chart a coach sees, just for their own data.
Every bar is colored by the effort rating that produced it (green through red), and the height of the bar is the Load for that session. Tapping a bar brings up the effort, duration, and load for that workout.
What coaches see
1. Per-session view on the client's calendar
Open any completed workout on a client's calendar and you will now see three fields at the top:
Effort (1-5 with color dot)
Duration (minutes)
Load (calculated value)
This is the fastest way to spot a mismatch. If a client's "easy" session came in at Effort 5, something changed. Sleep, stress, life, a nagging injury, a program that needs a tweak. Effort tells you to look. Duration and Load tell you how hard to look.
2. Trends over time
The Trends screen is where Load earns its keep. Coaches get three rolling windows:
7-day - the current training week at a glance
4-week - the current block
12-week - the current phase or season
Two insights are surfaced alongside the chart:
Average Load - mean load per session across the selected window. Useful for comparing one block to the next.
Total Load - sum of all load units in the window. Useful for week-over-week volume decisions and deload planning.
Bars are colored by the Effort that produced them (green to yellow to orange to red as intensity climbs), so a coach can see the mix of session intensities and the total stress in the same glance.
Colors, Values, and what they mean
All of the color coding in the app (on both client and coach trend charts) reflects the effort rating, not the load value. That keeps the color scale fixed and interpretable across every client and every phase.
Color | Effort | Read it as | Value |
🟢 Green | 1 - Easy | Low-intensity, recovery, or under-stimulus work | 0-100 |
🟢 Green/Yellow | 2 - Moderate | Steady, controlled work | 101-200 |
🟡 Yellow | 3 - Challenging | Productive training day | 201-350 |
🟠 Orange | 4 - Hard | High-intensity stimulus | 351-500 |
🔴 Red | 5 - All-Out | Maximum effort, testing day, or a session that ran away | 501+ |
A wall of red means the program is grinding the client down. A wall of green means the stimulus may be too low. A varied mix is usually what you want.
Turning the feature on
Effort ratings are a setting, not a default for every existing account. This is deliberate. If a coach turned it on for every client tomorrow without warning, clients would be confused, and some coaches would not want this extra step.
For new accounts
Defaults to ON. Every new coach account ships with Effort rating enabled for all clients. Nothing to do.
For existing accounts
Must be enabled in Settings. Go to Settings > Client Settings > Effort Rating and toggle the feature on. Save the setting before leaving the page.
Per-client override. Once enabled at the account level, the coach can toggle it off for any individual client from that client's profile. Useful for clients who would not use it well, or for clients where the coach is still manually prescribing RPE targets inside the program.
For clients
Clients do not see a toggle. Once the coach turns it on (globally or individually), the effort rating screen shows up at the end of the next workout. Once the coach turns it off, the screen disappears.
Coaching patterns that work
A few ways coaches are already using the data:
Weekly load review. Pull up the 7-day Trends view during your weekly check-in block. Spot any client whose total load spiked or cratered. Address it in your message.
Block-to-block comparison. At the end of a 4-week block, compare Average Load to the block before. Rising Average Load at the same program difficulty is usually a positive adaptation signal.
Deload enforcement. If the last 3 weeks sit at similar Total Load, the deload you programmed is not showing up as a deload in the data. Something in the program is letting the client hold the line.
Program mismatch. A client whose Effort rating disagrees with your expectation on the same session week-over-week is telling you something changed. Sometimes that is the client. Sometimes that is the program.
FAQs
Does the client have to enter effort and duration for every workout?
Effort and duration are both optional. The session still logs and counts without them. Load is only calculated when both are present.
What if a client forgets to rate a session?
The workout logs as complete without an effort rating. It will not produce a Load value for that session and will not show up on the Load chart. Clients can edit a past session and add the rating retroactively.
Can a coach enter effort on a client's behalf?
Yes. When a coach is walking a client through a session in person, the same completion flow appears on the coach's side. The coach can submit the effort and duration from there. This is how in-person coaches capture load data for their floor clients.
Why does my Trend chart look empty?
Either the feature is not enabled for the client, the client has not completed a session since it was enabled, or the client is logging completion without entering effort and duration. Check the setting first, then the most recent few sessions.
Does this replace RPE in the program itself?
No. Coaches can still prescribe RPE targets inside individual exercises. Effort rating is the session-level summary the client gives you at the end, not the set-by-set target you assigned.
How is this different from the OPEX Wellness / Vitals check-ins?
Check-ins are subjective daily readiness (sleep, stress, energy). Effort is the subjective output of a single session. Both are useful. They answer different questions.
Where does the math come from?
The formula is an adaptation of the session-RPE (sRPE) method from Foster et al., which multiplies an RPE rating by session duration to produce arbitrary training-load units. CoachRx uses a 5-point client-facing scale and maps it internally onto the RPE range so the resulting Load values behave the same way sRPE-based load does in the research literature.
Still stuck? Email coachrxsupport@opexfit.com.