A wireless communication system is presented for adaptive uplink (UL) link adaptation (LA). The adaptive UL LA can include multiple outer loops, for which multiple block error rate (BLER) filtering is performed. Each of the multiple BLER filtering can be performed on groups or sub-groups of subframes, in which each group has the same or similar coding characteristics. For example, one group in TD-LTE could be subframes with sounding reference signal (SRS) and another group could be subframes without SRS. Each of the multiple BLER filtering can use the same or different BLER algorithm, BLER target and/or BLER parameters.