Training Chats with Israel and Mladen – Episode 7: Subjective Ratings of Effort, Exertion, Discomfort and Some

I was in the middle of writing the final chapters for my upcoming Strength Manual, and I was explaining Dose – Response models including the subjective ratings, when Israel Halperin sent me a draft version of his upcoming opinion piece on rating of perceived effort. Perfect timing! Reading this made me rethink a few things I wanted to cover, but it also prompted more questions. I wanted to pick Israel’s brain regarding ratings of perceived effort and other things, so we have decided to record our conversation into a podcast.

Things that were covered in this podcast episode include his motivation for writing this opinion piece, explaining the difference between the various subjective ratings, including force, effort, exertion, discomfort, but also something that both myself and Israel think might be the next big thing – the ratings of pleasure/displeasure by using Feeling Scale.

The images below are taken from my upcoming Strength Manual and they might be helpful in order to follow this podcast, particularly my reasoning, which might not represent Israel’s reasoning, and I am more than happy to hear your opinions and feedback. I provided a few examples to hypothetically differentiate between different types of ratings and these are all included in the tables below. Once again, please keep in mind that these are sandbox concepts, but I believe they are useful to follow.

Figure 1 Six different theoretical buckets of subjective ratings. They are all interconnected based on the task at hand, expected duration, feedback and so forth.

Figure 2 Figure 2. Three sources of momentary failure and fatigue in general.

Table 1. Hypothetical ratings of RP-Output, RP-Effort, RP-Exertion and RP-Discomfort at the start and at the end of a few speed/power and endurance events. This is highly speculative, but with the illustrative purpose.

Table 2. Hypothetical ratings of RP-Output, RP-Effort, RP-Exertion and RP-Discomfort across set of different characteristics. This is highly speculative, but with the illustrative purpose.

This talk was very insightful, and if you are collecting and/or researching subjective ratings, such as RPE, make sure to give it a listen. If you have any recommendation and feedback, particularly on the implementation of the Feeling Scale, please let us know. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.