Have you ever had a hard time understanding just how hard you’re pushing yourself during a workout? Maybe you’ve been curious about wearing a heart rate monitor but don’t want to deal with all of the technology. Well, there’s a much easier way to estimate the intensity of your workouts. It’s called RPE, and here’s everything you need to know about it.
What is RPE?
RPE stands for Rate of Perceived Exertion and it’s a scale that you can use to estimate how hard you’re exercising. The scale goes from 1 to 10 and you can use breathlessness to help you choose a number. 1 RPE means that you’re breathing slowly and calmly. 10 means you’re pushing yourself as much as you possibly could, and you can barely breathe at all.
How to Use RPE
Objective measures of exertion such as heart rate, or factors such as the amount of weight you’re lifting or the length of time you’re exercising, don’t by themselves tell the full picture of your own personal subjective experience of how hard you’re working out. Ultimately, you’re the only one who can feel how a particular workout is affecting you as a unique individual.
That’s what makes RPE so useful: you can choose your goal RPE and you can tell on your own whether or not you’ve gotten there. So if you want to get good aerobic exercise, you might choose to try to stay within a range of 4-6 RPE. And if you want to lift for strength, at a weight that you can hit for only 3-5 reps, you’d choose to work at about an 8-9 RPE. The important part is that it’s suited to you and your own needs and experience.
