What is it about?
Some clinicians rely on asking their patients and clients "on a scale from 0 to 10, how hard are you working?" to determine the intensity of strength training exercises. While this has been shown to work well for cardiovascular activities, it is not well studied in strength exercises. Therefore, we looked at how ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) compared to the actual percentage of one-repetition maximum (1RM) strength. We paid careful attention to randomly assign weights and made sure that the participants didn't know what their 1RM was (called a non-anchored rating). This is how it is used in the clinic.
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Why is it important?
We found that individuals with knee impairments and healthy volunteers were very consistent in their RPE ratings between sessions (i.e. they rated the same weight as the same RPE over time). However, participants were not as successful in appropriately rating weights to their actual 1RM. In short, we as clinicians can't be sure that a rating of 5 equates to 50% of 1RM, or a rating of 7 equates to 70% 1RM. This can greatly impact the effectiveness of our programs, because proper dosing is crucial to improving strength and endurance.
Perspectives
This work emphasizes the need for baseline testing of strength capacity to deliver an intervention appropriately. We often complain that 1RM testing is too time consuming, but exercising at insufficient doses is a much bigger waste of time. Taking 5 to 10 minutes to determine the 1RM and structuring exercise loads based on that measure is a much more effective means to improve performance than it is to ask patients to guess at how hard they are working.
Dr Andrew D Lynch
University of Pittsburgh
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Test-Retest Reliability of Rating of Perceived Exertion and Agreement With 1-Repetition Maximum in Adults, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, September 2016, Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (JOSPT),
DOI: 10.2519/jospt.2016.6498.
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