Brady Holmer

One to 10 is kind of typical.

What people use like, how hard is this scale?

But

It's called the Borg RPE scale.

And the six to 20 is essentially because initially the theory behind that scale was that you would just add a zero to whatever your RPE was, and that would correspond to your heart rate.

So say average person has a maximal heart rate of around 200.

If I give you an RPE of 18, that means my heart rate's probably around 180, which is a fairly high intensity.

Whereas maybe my RPE right now is a six,

Maybe my heart rate's 60.

That's like a resting heart rate.

So that's kind of the idea behind that scale.

So people kind of can understand what that means and why we're doing six to 20 versus one to 10.

Another way is to use the talk test.

And that's essentially just like, are you able to do a full conversation, barely get out words or not talk at all?

That's kind of another way to kind of gauge zones.

The next and the final way to describe the zone is to be based on your percentage of your maximal heart rate.

And a lot of people have heart rate monitors.

So they're going to be able to measure their heart rate during exercise.

So we're going to define zones using all three of those kind of metrics.

So if we look at zone one, this is going to be a recovery intensity.