Understanding and improving percieved exertion assessment in runners

Abstract

Perceived exertion has been used for the assessment of effort among runners. However, it is unclear which strategies can significantly alter ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) in running. It is also unknown if perceived exertion scales are able to measure long-term effort in runners, allowing for chronic assessment of training load (TL). Therefore, the aims of this master thesis were 1) to systematically evaluate the body of knowledge regarding different factors that affect perceived exertion related to performance in runners, 2) to assess the validity of perceived exertion scales to assess weekly (W-RPE) and monthly (M-RPE) TL of runners and 3) to explore the sensitivity of W-RPE to assess TL compared to other methods. In the first manuscript a scoping review was performed using Web of Science, Pubmed, SPORTDiscus, PsychInfo and Embase databases with different descriptors of “rating perceived exertion” and “runners”. In the second manuscript, a methodological study was conduced with runners. Data were collected for the week distance ran (W-DIST), training time, and maximum, average, and resting heart rate (HR) for a four-week period. In addition, participants also answered perceived exertion scales for the week and for the month. Regarding the results for the manuscript, 7909 studies were included in the scoping review. It was observed that the number of publications in the field is continually growing, especially regarding the 6-20 RPE scale. Music, clothing and cooling strategies, presence of a hot environment, the deception of task difficulty, dissociation strategy, cognitive fatigue, inspiratory muscle warm-up and the presence of more then one athlete in the time trial (TT) were found to impact performance. RPE significantly increased over TT time but only ischemic preconditiong, at the beginning of the exercise, deception of difficult tasks, in the final meters of TT, and hot polluted environment significantly affected RPE between conditions. As for the results of the methodological study, fifty-three runners were included (mean age = 37.92±1.22). W-RPE and M-RPE presented correlations of 0.778 and 0.792 with the criterion measure. W-RPE demonstrated up to very large effect sizes (Δ = 6.59) for detecting changes in distance covered. In conclusion, music, cooling, deception strategies, heat environment, dissociation strategy, cognitive fatigue, inspiratory muscle warm-up and studies with running behavior strategies appear to be the most effective estrategies for improving performance, yet perceived exertion seems to be minimally affected by these performance variables, although, physical fatigue appears to increase RPE. W-RPE and M-RPE presented a strong to very strong validity, with the W-RPE demonstrating greater sensitivity for detecting TL.