Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE), or the 'talk test', is a good fitness assessment method, especially for unfit individuals.

“one way is just raing have perceived exertion or RP um and this is just a subjective measure of how hard you think you're exercising and uh this is typically on a 6 to 20 scale now that might seem kind of weird for people like why is it not 1 to 10 1 to 10 is kind of typical um what people use like uh how hard is this scale but it's called the Borg RP scale and the 6 to 20 is essentially because the um initially the theory behind that scale was that you were just add a zero to whatever your RP was and that would correspond to your heart rate so say average person has a maximum heart rate of around 200 if I give you an RP of 18 that means my heart rate is probably around 180 which is a fairly high intensity whereas maybe my RP 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 what what that means and why we're doing 6 to 20 versus 1 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 to kind of gauge zones the next and the final way to describe the zone is to be um based on your percentage of your maximum 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”

“I think also what people can think about doing is using a combination of all three you know you can use heart rate you can use RP you can use the talk test maybe see if those you know correlate with one another during exercise um but use all of those to kind of inform your exercise intensity”

“I would say you know if people are more experienced with exercise then you could use something like RP to kind of gauge your intensity but those neard exercise might actually have a lot of good feedback with the talk test I even kind of use that I mean you know it's if you're running with a group of people and you can have a conversation okay well we're probably in zone two if I'm really struggling to like breathe then I might be in zone three four or even five so um I think it's a great way to use the talk test anybody can use it but I think newer people might benefit more from that”