Intensity

What is Intensity?

There are a few ways of measuring intensity.

Rated Perceived exertion (RPE) or Relative Intensity

This could be a number from 1 to 10 based on the person trainings belief on how hard they are working.

If the trainee believes that they are working as hard as they can it’s a 10. If they are sitting on a couch watching TV it’s a 1.

The problem with this method is that the person training really needs to have experienced maximum intensity to understand what maximum intensity is and whether they are training at maximum intensity.

It is so subjective that really it’s not the greatest method of measuring intensity.

Absolute Intensity (AI)

Absolute intensity in weight training terms is how close a person is lifting to their 1RM. So if you are lifting at 90% AI then your intensity is higher. Than if you are lifting at 80% of AI.

A simple measure which can be then followed up with calculating your 6RM and then performing sets of 4 reps. A 6RM is somewhere around 80 to 85% of your 1RM.

Intensity

In order to calculate roughly how hard your working you can use measures combining both AI and RPE.

You may choose to train with a weight of 80% of absolute intensity and hit failure on each set so that Relative intensity is 10 on each working set.

If you perform many of your sets at an AI of 80% and RPE of 10/10 or 100% you will have to decrease your volume because you won’t have the ability to perform many sets at that intensity as muscular fatigue sets in quite quick.

Neural Adaption

When you train using an RPE of 10 and high absolute intensities you will also realise very quick that your neural system will be under a great deal of stress.

Managing Recovery

The higher the intensity the longer the recovery and the lesser the volume of exercise you will be able to sustain and recover from.

You will will have greater muscle damage and greater neural stress resulting in longer recovery times.

How to manage Intensity

In order to manage recovery it’s important to manage intensity And realise that there is several types of hypertrophy and not all is related to how much you lift. More in that in a later article.

in realising that you need to have workouts that have different levels of Absolute and relative intensity. That means having higher intensity low volume workouts interspersed with low intensity high volume workouts. It also means working between low and high AI and RPE workouts.

Compound versus Isolation

The type of exercises you choose are also important to recovery. If all your exercises are compound then it puts greater stress on more muscles and greater neural stress. So creating programs that have isolation and compound movements means that you can increase volume with isolation movements and potentially load muscles more in a given workout cycle and add to the growth potential.

Overall

The structure of a program is always dependant on each person and their lifestyle and whether they are Active which can hinder recovery. It also depends on Age, body type, training experience, how good their diet is and how much they sleep.

All these factors need to be taken into account when creating and updating a program.

To get good results you need to have intensity but the intensity needs to be monitored.