RP Hypertrophy Training App: My Honest Review
As physique development enthusiasts, you make it your mission each day to do all that is in your power to turn the dials on the inputs that lead to increases in muscle mass, losing body fat, or at the very least retaining your hard-earned muscle whilst in a caloric deficit. One primary mediator of that goal is of course resistance training, but exactly how to conduct that act is an area that unfortunately causes much confusion, worry and debate amongst trainees when it comes to knowing how best to program for themselves or their clients. Whether it be exercise selection, what frequency they train each body part, the dose of the volume or effort they perform each set at in each workout. In the age of social media, you can scroll any hashtag regarding training for body composition outcomes and find a plethora of recommendations leaving you more confused than where you started, for both novice and advanced trainees alike.
Thankfully, we do have a solid base of scientific evidence to at the very least make solid starting point recommendations for all of the above, that can be adjusted over time to suit each individual's genetically unique response, preferences, and time allotments. You may choose to comb through all of the available data yourself, pair that up with some ‘in the trenches anecdotes’ alongside your own personal experiences to come up with a plan that works for you, you may subscribe to multiple research reviews for an easier interpretation of the data from expert opinion, you may choose to follow a program purchased from somebody you respect in the industry, or even hire an online coach for the highest level of control over your programming. Or, as we are going to discuss today, appeal to new technology via the use of an app to guide you in your training.
I’ve personally used an app to logbook my own training for quite a number of years now. I’ve used HeavySet and RepCount extensively, but for all intents and purposes, these are simply logbooking tools, and they do not offer any solution to the problems referenced above. I was asked to trial the new hypertrophy app from the Renaissance Periodization team upon release, and finally now as I’m just coming up on a consistent 12 months of using it, I wanted to finally put together my personal review of using it myself, watching my wife use it daily, alongside a good portion of my clients.
If I had to offer a broad summary of what the app offers, it would be that The RP Hypertrophy App is the first of its kind (that I have seen, at least) that takes the weight of the current hypertrophy evidence regarding recommended training volumes, frequency, exercise selection, effort and progressive overload models, distills them into a variety of optional preset programs, and presents you with a practical roadmap that is constantly autoregulated based on your own personal response to follow for your own training, which guarantees long-term progression.
Upon downloading the app, the very first thing you’ll need to do is design/choose your first mesocycle. Mesocycle is just fancy sports-science terminology for a block of training emphasizing a specific goal, so don’t let that scare you off. For those of you who don’t know where to begin with designing your own programming, you can choose a preset template from a long list of programs already built into the app, that I was glad to see was continually updated over my time of using the app too. You can select based on the number of days you train per week, how long the training block will last, any body part prioritization you have, or you can even run the same programming as some of the guys you may follow at RP such as Dr. Mike or Jared. If you don’t want to run a preset, and rather just want to use the app to logbook your performances and autoregulate your volume and progressive overload, then you can build in your own programming using a custom mesocycle design (this is what I have done throughout my time of using the app).
When you select what preset you’d like to run with, the app will offer you a full recommended weekly layout including exercise selection, but these are extremely easy to tailor to your preferences. You can change the exercise order, change what day you perform each workout on, pick an exercise from a huge dropdown list, or add custom exercises for each specific body part being trained each day. If you’re unsure on how to perform any exercise listed, the app also contains a huge exercise library for you to ensure your execution is on point. For your custom meso designs, you simply select what body parts are trained each day, what day of the week you start each rotation from, and plug in your exercises. I personally plugged in all the machines I had in the Doghouse as custom exercises, and the remainder of my cable and dumbbell exercises were already included as options to select.
In week 1, you’ll be given a recommendation of training volume on a per-body part per-session basis that falls in the lower end of the general hypertrophy recommendations, or around-about ‘minimum effective volume’ as has been coined by Dr. Mike. From there onwards, you track your load and rep performance on each exercise, and you’ll be continually prompted throughout your training week at stages, such as when finishing training a body part, when you finish an exercise, or when you next train a body part that week to provide data that will offer an insight into the levels of stimulus, fatigue, recovery and adaptations that your training is providing. For example, how difficult the exercise felt, how pumped you are after training a body part, how sore each body part gets.
In my opinion, it is at this point that the reason why I’ve stuck with the app for so long becomes clear, and why I have recommended it to so many, begins to shine and separate itself from other training apps. This is where the adaptive training logic of the app will begin to offer recommendations on if your volume should change in any exercise, and what your load and rep targets should be in your following sessions. Looking back on our first points of struggle for trainees, the app is now taking the guesswork out of the equation, and autoregulating those hypertrophy inputs that we identified for you, meaning that you no longer have to be concerned with wondering if anything that you’re doing isn’t ‘optimal’ for long-term progression, and you can simply execute your sessions without any emotional input into your own training.
Autoregulating training according to what feedback we receive from each session is something that I have done for multiple years with clients, and myself. It can certainly be difficult to remember to note down every session how everything feels, how sore everything gets and for how long, alongside logbooking all of your load and rep performance for each individual exercise. Believe me, it’s even more difficult to ask all of your clients to do that also, and then put all of that information into a spreadsheet for me to dive into each week. Due to the app prompting you to provide that feedback in the moment, whilst you’re actually training, has been a godsend to making this process so much simpler and less time-consuming. Not only regarding stimulus proxies, but also the ease of having your progressive overload mapped out for you and just needing to tick off the performance the app recommends (or demands of you, depending on how you want to see it!) is not only time-saving, but for me, removes an emotional burden or needing to think deeply or plan each session excessively. I’ve found, removing as much emotional connection to these inputs as possible, and just executing what is being asked of me has relieved a burden of my sessions, and increased the enjoyment substantially.
When you reach the end of your mesocycle, the app programs in a deload week for you based on your previous training volumes, load and rep progression from the week prior. Again, removing a lot of the ‘noise’ of having to wonder how long to deload for, how many sets to reduce to, and what load/rep targets you should perform on those days. Again, this is huge for any of you fellow overthinkers out there, and guarantees once again that if you just execute as the app requests, you’ll ensure that you wash off the accumulated fatigue from your previous training block to set you up for maximum progression right from week 1 of your next mesocycle.
In terms of pricing, the app costs around £28/month when converting USD to GBP, but there’s savings for bulk buying in 6 or 12 month subscriptions, with the 12 month option equating to £20/month. The RP team did ping me over a discount code to offer to clients/friends when I began the trial too which gives you a 30% reduction on those prices. So, if you use code PHYSIQUE, and purchase the 12 month option, you’ll be paying £16.75/month. I can only speak for my own value assessment here of course, but when you compare the pricing of the preset programs alone, that’s incredibly well valued compared to what people are paying for one-off programs currently. Pair that up with the fact that new programs are released frequently, the app is continually updated and offers you what is essentially a full training solution covering all aspects of your progress, I believe that’s incredibly good value. I have also seen that RP offer a 30-day risk-free money back guarantee, so that if you do not like the app for whatever reason, you can get your money back within a 30 day period.
I’ve obviously touted all that I love about the app thus far, as I genuinely do believe it offers a brilliant solution to all of the issues we’ve been through thus far, but in the nature of fairness I’ll attempt to list out some of the cons that I’ve come across using the app thus far.
One issue some individuals may have is the inability for the app to currently manage an asynchronous training split, as the mesocycle design depends on a full calendar week. For example, if you were running a 5 day split with 2 rotations (e.g. Push/Pull/Off/Legs/Off), then that would span over a 10 day period. I haven’t personally ran a split like this in some years, so this hasn’t been a problem for me, and I also do not design splits for clients in this way as we typically check in once per week, and hence I want to be able to view a full rotation at each check in, but consider this if this is your preferred method of programming.
The single con that I have personally experienced, is the inability to adjust mesocycle length whilst progressing through the mesocycle itself. For example, I prefer to autoregulate the number of weeks that I spend on any given mesocycle depending on how well I am progressing week to week. If I have roughly planned to train for 5 weeks prior to deloading, but on that 5th week I am progressing well, feeling good and suffering zero symptoms or signs of requiring a deload, then I will continue training until I do. If I have already set my mesocycle length to be 5 weeks, then I cannot add any additional weeks before the app will roll me into a deload. This hasn’t been too problematic however, as I have simply overwritten my performances on that final week with my new numbers, and then the app will still program my deload week according to that data as and when I do decide to take one, so this is a relatively minor issue.
Quite honestly, those two points are the only two cons I can think of at this moment. At no point of using the app over the past year has anything else cropped up that I would have liked to see change, and to be honest, I’d be surprised at the current rate of updates if these issues weren’t adjusted relatively soon.
One problem I have had with previous training apps that I was using just to logbook my workouts was the poor user experience. These apps were typically pretty clunky, would crash, were hard to navigate or customize, which most of the time led me back to just using notes on my phone in the end. I found the user experience of the RP Hypertrophy App all the way from signing up, setting up my first mesocycle, navigating through each workout and logging my data accurately to be extremely easy.
To add to my own experiences, I have the feedback of my wife (and thus, harshest critic!), and a pool of clients who have now used the RP Hypertrophy App. In these cases, I’ve written their mesocycles in week 1 format into my coaching sheets, and then they have set up those mesocycle designs into the app as a custom mesocycle. I can honestly say that on zero occasions have any of them asked for clarification on how to set anything up, how to add exercises, how to navigate various portions of the app etc. Not only is this is a huge plus for the individuals using the app, such as the aforementioned lack of needing to keep a wide array of notes to provide for your coach to be able to effectively autoregulate your programming, and not to have to work out your own progressive overload targets based on a progression scheme provided by your coach, but there’s huge benefit for the coach also. I do not need to worry if my clients are collating their data correctly, or if they’re ever unsure of how is best to overload any one specific exercise in a given session when I’m not there to make a suggestion in the moment, I know that the app has that covered absolutely for me, so there will be no wasted sessions for my clients. We also have a bunch of individuals on the Physique Collective forum sharing exactly the same sentiments as these towards the app, so I’m confident that this is an accurate reflection of the user experience.
As a summary, I can’t see myself training without using the RP Hypertrophy App from this point forward, and I’ll continue to recommend it to clients who want to gleam some of the benefits mentioned in this article. I really tried to be as objective as critical as possible here, but at this time I don’t have much by way of cons or complaints or even subtle adjustments that I would want to make to the app. It answers many problems that we face as trainees in the gym every day, takes the stress of (over)analysis out of our training, and allows us to simply execute each session and reap progression over the long-term with evidence-based recommendations, and a genuinely enjoyable user experience. I’ll end this article with the broad view summary of the app, which really does sum up what I feel that this app does so well:
The RP Hypertrophy App is the first of its kind (that I have seen, at least) that takes the weight of the current hypertrophy evidence regarding recommended training volumes, frequency, exercise selection, effort and progressive overload models, distills them into a variety of optional preset programs, and presents you with a practical roadmap that is constantly autoregulated based on your own personal response to follow for your own training, which guarantees long-term progression.
