Test your fitness level before you start training

By gab

On the previous post we have shown how important is to target your activity to the right level in order to optimize your training and increasing your lactate threshold.

Professional athlets have a full medical staff and lab equipments at their disposal to accurately measure and monitor their oxygen consumption, lactate threshold and many more physiological parameters that tell the coaches how to target the training for that individual athletes. Less advanced athletes or practitioners do not have that possibility but can still use an excellent tool to assess their fitness level, that is the Perceived Exertion Scale or RPE.

Perceived exertion is a way to measure of how hard you feel your body is exercising; In other words on how tough for you is the training your are doing. The physical feeling you perceive is the results of many factors including heart rate, breathing rate, sweating, muscle soreness. Studies have shown that this way of measuring the workout load provides a fairly good approximation to the real values resulting from the measurements done in a medical labs. The RPE scale was first introduced by Borg in 1998 and it is a scale whose levels have proved to correlate with physiological measures such as HR, VO2max, ventilatory minute volume, CO2 production, lactate accumulation, and body temperature as the exercise intensity increases.. Each step in the scale (the scale ranges from 6 to 20) is defined with a description of the effort felt by the athletes while performing the work out.

The RPE Scale as defined in 1998 by Borg

Let’s now have a look at the actual scale.

6 No exertion at all

7
Extremely light (7.5)
8

9 Very light

11 Light

13 Somewhat hard

15 Hard (heavy)

17 Very hard

19 Extremely hard

20 Maximal exertion

How to use the RPE scale

Using the RPE scale is easy.
Try to run a test on yourself. Pick up a training plan you like, you can choose one in the 3rd or 4th week of our “4 weeks swimming training plan” set up your target time for the interval training or for the steady state training and while doing the workout note down your perception of exertion. Focus on judging your overall stress, not only your leg pain or arm pain or heart rate, but your full physical stress level. Choose the number from the scale and write it next to each repetition on each set. This will give you an idea on how you feel your body is doing under that level of activity. Be accurate and honest with your measurement or you will have a less than optimal result from the test and then from your swimming training plan.

Here is some example on what the different levels might feel like to you.

9 corresponds to “very light” exercise. For a healthy person, it is like walking slowly at his or her own pace for some minutes

13 on the scale is “somewhat hard” exercise, but it still feels OK to continue.

17 “very hard” is very strenuous. A healthy person can still go on, but he or she really has to push him- or herself. It feels very heavy, and the person is very tired.

19 on the scale is an extremely strenuous exercise level. For most people this is the most strenuous exercise they have ever experienced.

The RPE scale and the Lactate threshold

Studies have identified that a RPE level between 13 and 15, which corresponds to feelings of “somewhat hard” and “hard”, represent an effort level similar to that where the lactate threshold occurs. So if your endurance training targets a steady-state workout below lactate threshold you should aim at a feeling slightly below “somewhat hard”, while if you are planning an interval training set above lactate threshold you should perceive the effort intensity between hard and very hard.

Repeat the test every month or so. This will allow you to adjust your training sessions, your target time and rest time as your fitness conditions improves and keep your training effort always at the optimal level.

Keep healthy keep swimming

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