Categories:
General,
Glossary
Perceived Effort (also known as subjective effort) is a 0 to 10 based scoring system that reflects your own personal view on the level of exertion required to perform an activity / workout. Below is a guide.
| Score | Label | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Rest | Apart from lying, sitting or standing still, you are not doing anything! Get off that couch! |
| 1 | Very very easy | Very light exertion, such as gentle walk. |
| 2 | Very easy | Light exertion, such as a fast walk or even a gentle run. |
| 3 | Easy | An exertion level that you can easily hold a conversation. One you feel that you could maintain for hours. This is commonly the level for a typical easy run. |
| 4 | Moderate | You can still hold that conversation, it’s just getting a little more difficult. |
| 5 | Somewhat hard | It is difficult to hold a conversation at this level, and you certainly need a little time between sentences to get your breath back. |
| 6 | Moderately hard | Your breathing’s getting hard and you can only manage short sentences at a time. Generally, this is the level that TrainAsONE Threshold workouts are aiming for, though you might feel otherwise. |
| 7 | Hard | An intense level of exercise, where you are breathing hard and when asked to do it for 15 minutes your only thought is ‘no way’ (to put it mildly). |
| 8 | Really hard | A high level of exercise that you could maintain for at most 6 to 8 minutes. You might be able to utter a word or two, but you’d be gasping if you did. Generally, this is the level that TrainAsONE Interval workouts are targetted at, though you might think differently! |
| 9 | Really really hard | This is an extremely high exertion level that you could maintain for not much more than a minute – if you are lucky. Talking is probably out of the question. Generally, this is the level that TrainAsONE Repetition workouts are aiming for, though you might feel otherwise! |
| 10 | Maximal | Your maximum effort. This would be ‘all out’ efforts such as your fastest sprints or a race where you ‘gave it your all’. Consequently, this should mean that this rating would include fast assessment runs. |
Four important points:
- Whilst the above is centred on expressing effort with respect to breathing and conversational ability, your rating should also reflect additional factors such as duration and general fatigue. For example, a very slow paced run that you can easily hold a conversation (level 3), but is of a long duration on tired legs would be upgraded to a higher score. As such, and expressed above, by definition a best effort race would also be a 10.
- When scoring speed workouts and assessment runs you should primarily be thinking about the fast steps. However, if (for example) you found the warm-up and cool-down steps a little harder than you would expect you may wish to increase your score slightly.
- This is a guide. Do not feel bound by it. For example, we know users who find Repetition runs not as strenuous as the above would suggest and mark them nearer a 7 and feel Intervals are more of a 9.
- Find a set of rules that seem right for you, and stick to these. Consistency of how you score is more important than the scores themselves, i.e. If I always score my easy runs as a 4 and you a 2, that is fine.
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