It doesn’t matter what your fitness experience is, you can use perceived exhaustion to help measure your fitness experience. Remember, perceived exhaustion is how hard it is for you to do the workout. It’s not about walking the furthest or running the fastest. It’s about how you feel when you are doing the exercise.
Think for a moment, when you go to a doctor and they ask you to tell them on a scale of 1 to 10 – how badly does something hurt? A 10 being excruciating and a 1 being discomfort. This is using a perceived pain scale to help determine how to treat the problem.
When it comes to your exercise program, you can do the same thing. RPE stands for Rate of Perceived Exertion. We’ve talked about that before. But we’re going to simplify it for this discussion.
To use perceived exhaustion, do the following:
- Identify that a 1 is easy as pie – no more difficult than a stroll to the refridgerator. A 10 is impossible, you’ll keel over trying to achieve it
- You want your rate of perceived exertion to start around a 5 – this is hard work, but you can do it
- You can push it to a 6 for a time and maybe a 7, but you can’t sustain that rate, you need to drop back to a 5
- You use the rate of perceived exertion to intermittently push the limit and then return to the hard, but comfortable pace
With weights, you might do ten lifts with ten pounds and 2 with 15 pounds and 1 with 25 pounds. With walking, you might walk at a 3.0 pace for 10 minutes, push it to 3.5 for 3 minutes and go all the way to 4.0 for 1 minute and then return to 3.0.
The idea is to make your exercise sessions more effective through challenge and fun. The challenge pushes you and your muscles and even if you can only sustain those high weights or speeds for a brief time, the exertion carries over into the rest of your workout.
So how hard to you push your rate of perceived exertion?