A gym session, a swim and a hill run in the same week. The watch gives three different stories. How do you add them up?
How hard it feels
A gym session, a swim and a hill run in the same week. The watch gives three different stories. How do you add them up?
By asking yourself one question after each one: out of ten, how hard was that? Multiply the answer by the minutes and you have a single number that compares a swim with a gym session, which no heart-rate reading can do. Carl Foster's group published the method in 2001 and it is now the most widely used load measure in team sport, precisely because it needs no equipment: rating seven for sixty minutes gives 420, and a week of four such sessions gives 1,680.
The knowhow
The rating scale to use is the ten-point one, where two is easy, five is moderate, seven is hard and ten is everything you have. The older Borg scale runs from six to twenty for a reason worth knowing: multiplied by ten it lands near the heart rate of a healthy adult at that effort, so thirteen is about 130 beats. Both work; the important thing is to use one of them consistently and to rate the session as a whole, about half an hour after finishing, rather than in the worst moment of it.
And so
What the total is for is comparison with your own recent weeks, which is the training-load week later in the year. A week that jumps far above the previous few is the pattern most associated with injury, and a number makes that visible where feeling does not. It also catches the opposite: a run of weeks so similar that nothing is being asked of you.
And so
The method's honesty depends on rating the session you had, not the one you planned.
Keep this
Effort out of ten, times the minutes. That is the one number that compares any two sessions.
Now try it with your own numbers. Take one session from this week. Enter how hard it felt out of ten, how many minutes it lasted, and how many sessions like it you do in a week.
Foster C, Florhaug JA, Franklin J, et al. A new approach to monitoring exercise training. J Strength Cond Res 2001;15(1):109-115. | Borg GA. Psychophysical bases of perceived exertion. Med Sci Sports Exerc 1982;14(5):377-381.
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My tries: every time you save, your numbers, what they came to, and your note are kept here so you can compare later.