Ezequiel Morsella, director of the Action and Consciousness Laboratory at San Francisco State University, argues that conscious awareness is driven by urgency.55 To see what he means, hold your breath for as long as you can. When you feel that burning discomfort compelling you to breath, and how it dominates your attention, you’ve experienced what he means.
The motor-control hardware in our brains acts “like a steering wheel that different parts of the brain are trying to influence at the same time,” says Morsella. These ‘want’ signals often conflict, their intensity in proportion to urgency. When one of them becomes critical for survival, as it would be after 30 seconds without air, that’s when you become
aware. Consciousness acts as the tie-breaker for otherwise unconscious processes.
The brain, as we know, is particularly sensitive to the intensity of physical sensations, and when you exercise, fatigue in heart and lungs and muscles begins competing for our attention. As we saw from the work of Noakes and Marcora, our conscious perception of difficulty, expressed as a rating of perceived exertion (RPE), increases as we tire out. The feeling becomes sharper, more demanding. We come with a built-in fatigue sense, and we can put it to work.
The RPE scale was first applied to exercise by Gunnar Borg at Lund University in Sweden back in the 1960s. Borg’s RPE scale was originally intended for cardio training, using a 20-point rating that could rate whole-body effort anywhere from “asleep” to “I’m about to die”. 56
The whole-body effort of a racing heart and burning lungs is somewhat different from the local muscular and mental effort of lifting weights, so it’s not immediately clear that the RPE scale would apply.
Fortunately, researchers like Kristen Lagally of Illinois State University have taken the RPE scale and tested its application to resistance exercise. Lagally’s research shows that, provided weight-training subjects are familiarized with the RPE scale, their ratings of muscular effort are accurate to a fault. These findings suggests that RPE scale can apply to the perceived effort of active muscles as well as they can to “breathing hard” cardiovascular difficulty.57
How you feel may be a lie over a span of time, but while the effort is going on, how you feel is remarkably accurate.
Mike Tuchscherer, record-holding powerlifter and author of The Reactive Training
Manual, developed an RPE scale as the basis of his Reactive Training System, which is geared
towards powerlifting and overall strength training.
A maximum effort anchors the top of the scale with a score of 10, which would be a best-right-now lift without the possibility of another unassisted rep. A nine leaves you with one or two reps, still hard but staying just shy of maximum. An eight leaves you with 2-4 possible reps ― heavy but comfortable ― while a seven qualifies as speed work, only felt as “hard” when you focus on acceleration.
RPE measures quality. Lifts with RPE scores of 7-9 could be described as smooth, crisp, or springy, whereas a more fatiguing lift in the 9-10 range brings to mind words like grinding and straining (these aren’t precise wordings, but most anyone can relate to these descriptions if they’ve lifted weights). One rep or twenty, you can rate any set according to how hard it felt.
Don’t underestimate subjective feedback. When you look at a program on paper, all you see is numbers. When you start a program, six sets of three at 80% leaves you winded and seeing stars. A few months later, the same workout barely registers. That’s a huge difference in quality which the numbers alone just can’t capture.
I’ve always used informal notes to record feelings, jotting down “really hard” or “surprisingly easy” or “that was a 5” whenever an important set did something unusual, ever since I first read about RPE in Supertraining.
While I think a five-point scale, or even using descriptive words like “easy”, “hard”, or “saw stars”, works fine as long as you’re consistent with it, the RTS scale standardizes all that in a way that makes a lot of sense, and I’ve found that having a consistent numerical scale is useful just for consistency’s sake.
Forcing yourself to pay attention, to reflect on and honestly evaluate each set, adds information that percentages and sets can’t quite capture, and this helps you keep your work sets dialed in to that zone of quality.
Think smooth. Think crisp.
Learning how to lift with quality is critical to any kind of training, but if you want to train hard on a regular basis, it’s absolutely essential to be honest about your effort.
Quality means less physical stress and less emotional stress, which means you’ll feel more “recovered” between workouts. Quality means you’re owning the weights, even if they’re heavy and a little slow to the eye.
Quality means deliberate practice, working right at the edge of your limits – but no further – every time. You’re already naturally good at this. All you have to do is pay attention.