Perceptive?

I spend a fair amount of time with numbers.  It’s a hazard of my profession.  We are trained to track heart rates, reps, weight, sets, inches, miles, minutes.  This is not entirely bad, but it can be limiting.

My twenty pounds might not be the same as yours.  My mile might be different, too.  It depends on all kinds of things like previous experience, injury status, age, general health, and even hydration status and weather.  What is easy or hard for me may be negligible or impossible for someone else.  This means that saying someone lifted twenty pounds or ran a mile is not all that meaningful without context.

One way to get context without a lot of words is to use something called the Borg scale.  It does have numbers, but the numbers are somewhat arbitrary (especially since they’ve been revised from one arbitrary range to another!).  The Borg scale “measures” perceived exertion.  The beauty of it is that the perceiver is the person doing the work.

What that means is I evaluate my workout based on how hard I think I’m working.  I aim for it to be somewhat hard to hard.  We all have days when our usual workout feels easy and those other days when it seems impossible—the Borg scale lets us adjust to what is appropriate on this very day.

This is also useful for people who take medications that alter their heart rate response or people who don’t want to wear a heart rate monitor or tracker or stop to count pulses.

Those of us who are just starting to exercise want to work at a level we think of as light to moderate.  Moderate to somewhat hard would be the next level.  And so on.  Interval training would move us from a lower level of perceived exertion to a higher one and back.

Try it out!