The effect of environment on the relationship between perceived exertion and heart rate difference

Abstract:
Exercise load assessment is currently one of the main areas of research in scientific physical training, which allows trainers to develop more effective training schemes for athletes. However, previous studies only developed exercise load assessment protocols in a comfortable environment, thus the effect of environmental factors has been neglected. Therefore, we propose to investigate the effect of environment on the relationship between exercise-to-resting heart rate difference (HRD) and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE). In this study, we collected electrocardiogram signals and RPE scores from 20 healthy adults when they were taking running exercise under different temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH) conditions. Based on the data, we proposed a model for the relationship between RPE and HRD considering environmental factors through multiple regression method and analyze their effects on the RPE and HRD relationship by generalize overall trends and key turning points of the multiple regression model regarding environmental factors. Compared to the model without environmental factors, our model improves the accuracy of predicting RPE using HRD by 21.87%. We also found there are key turning points in HRD, T and RH which have major trend changes on the prediction of RPE using HRD: 50 bpm, 39deg C and 50%, respectively. The results of this prospective study provide a basis for accurate prediction of subjective exercise load based on HRD by introducing environmental factors.