Validity of Ratings of Perceived Exertion in Adolescent Physical Exercise: A Meta-analysis

The literature related to Borg's rating of perceived exertion scale in adolescent physical exercise has revealed inconsistencies about the strength of the relationship between rating of perceived exertion and various physiological criterion measures, such as heart rate, blood lactate concentration, percent maximal oxygen uptate and respriation rate and so on. Therefore, In order to estimate the relationship between ratings of perceived exertion(RPE) and physiological variables(i.e., heart rate, lactic acid, maximal oxygen uptake, respiration rate, and so on) in adolescent physical exercise, we undertook a meta-analysis to determine the strength of the ralationship. The results showed that the mean correlation coefficients were 0.55 for heart rate, 0.61 for blood lactate, 0.65 for maximal oxygen uptake, 0.59 for oxygen uptake, 0.68 for ventilation threshold, 0.75 for respiration rate. Meanwhile, according to the analysis of some study features, such as sex, fitness, type of RPE scale and exercise protocol and so on, we suggested that the following study feature could account for the variation of results across studies: heart rate-fitness(sedentary, healthy but inactive, activce and highly fit), type of exercise, and REP model; blood lactate concentration-gender, RPE scale; percentage of maximal oxygen uptate-study features(excellent, satisfactory and poor); oxygen uptate-gender, exercise type, exercise protocol; ventalitation gender, RPE mode; respiration-exercise protocol, RPE mode. In addition, the highest correlations between ratings of perceived exertion and the various physiological criterion measures were found in the following conditions: when male participants (whose (v)over doto(2) or ventalitation was measured) were required to maximally exert themselves; when the exercise task was swimming( when %(v)over doto(2), and respiration rate are measured) and so on. These findings suggest that although Borg's RPE scale has been shown to be a valid measure of exercise intensity in adolescent, its validity may not be as high as previously thought, except under certain conditions.