Israel Halperin in the News

The goal of this project, which was part of Aviv Emanuel's PhD work, was to examine if subjective experiences can be used to guide trainees through a resistance training session. We asked 20 participants to complete sets of resistance exercises to the point of failure. That is, the point in which participants couldn’t have completed another repetition. During the sets, after completing each repetition, participants verbally reported their perceived effort using a 0-10 effort scale, in which 0 represents no effort and 10 represents maximal effort. We found strong relationships between perception of effort and reaching failure.

Given the importance of resistance training to health-related outcomes, it is critical to study ways to better prescribe it. We speculate that the perception-based approach has the potential to increase initiation and adherence to resistance training. This is because it is easy to understand and follow, and can effectively account for individual differences. Accordingly, we are now planning to investigate the utility of this approach in a number of randomized controlled trails among a range of populations.

See full article based on Halperin's recent paper