Accessibility

Workout Glossary

Understanding your exercises

Warm up

You should always start your workout with a more gentle set of exercises to get your body warmed up and ready for action. This reduces the risk of injury and should put you in the right condition to tackle the exercises ahead.

Main set

This is the core of the workout. Always pay careful attention to any notes such as ‘focus on controlled technique’ these simple notes could be vital to safely and successfully completing the workout.

Cool down

At the end of a workout it is essential to have a cool down session. Just follow the instructions on how to ease your body out of an intense activity. It is vital that you give the cool down your full attention as it may help your to avoid injury.

Time

Each individual exercise in your workout is either given an amount of time for you to perform the exercise for or an amount of reps that you should perform.

Sets

A set consists of a given number of reps of the exercise. So, if the instructions say Sets: 2, Reps: 15, this would mean that 15 reps are required to complete a set, meaning you would perform the exercise a total of 30 times.

Reps

Rep, or repetition, is the action of performing the exercise once. We show you the amount of repetitions that you should do to complete one set. So, if the instructions say Sets: 2, Reps: 15, this would mean a total of 30 repetitions would need to be completed.

Intensity/RPE

This stands for rate of perceived exertion. This shows the predicted intensity of the exercise.

  • 1 – Very light activity (anything more than complete rest)
  • 2-3 – Light activity (you can maintain for hours, easy to breath and hold a conversation)
  • 4-5 – Moderate activity (you can maintain for a long period, able to talk and hold conversation)
  • 6-7 – Vigorous activity (starting to become uncomfortable, short of breath, can speak only short sentences)
  • 8-9 – Very hard activity (difficult to maintain this intensity, hard to speak)
  • 10 – Max effort (unable to maintain for more than a very short period, unable to talk)