New Feature: Exercise Ratings

Mylo just got a new feature! You can now rate how hard an exercise felt during your training from "Very Easy" to "Maximum Effort!!".

While training, a particular exercise can feel easy or hard, but there's more nuance in there.

Giving exercises a rating can help better connect to how this exercise felt. Was it hard because of the weights, poor sleep that night, or something else.

The information then appears in training (where you can set it), in the training report, and in the workout's details. When you do your next session you can get a sense of how it went last time.

How it works

While training, you'll see a new gauge icon in front of the exercise rest.

Tapping that will open a menu with your difficulty options:

The RPE Scale

The difficulty options come from the Rate of Perceived Effort (RPE) scale by Gunnar Borg. It's often used as a different way to define an exercise. For example you'd see Bench Press @50kg for RPE 5.

This means, keep the weight at 50kg but do as many reps to feel the exercise is just "5 - Hard", how ever many reps that would take.

Here though I'm using the same scale to rate how the exercise felt to you with how it was otherwise defined. The idea with these options is you can find what best matches how the exercise felt.

If you're constantly rating it on the lower end then great! You can continue increasing the intensity.

If instead the difficulty stays high and plateaus there, it could be a sign to lower the intensity, do some accessory exercises to train weaker points, or just focus on rest.

It's up to you, I wanted to make that information available and make it easier to think about.

This is an optional feature. You can continue training as before, but if you want to connect better to your training and get a sense of how you're progressing you can now do so through exercise ratings.

What's next?

Rating exercises is the starting point.

I think it makes sense to also add a rating for the overall session. This can show information that an exercise rating average wouldn't.

I've had workouts where I would rate everything at 8 or more but it was a great workout. Similarly, I've felt great about a workout that was super easy as I was taking important steps in recovery.

Next on this path, would be exercise (and training) notes. There's only so much you can get with just a number. Sometimes you want to write why exactly it was a 7 or even put a reminder about form for next time.

To do notes justice, I want to start working on better history support so you can see current and past notes.

I'm just thinking out loud, these are early thoughts and I'd love to get your input. You can join the discord and let me know what you think!

If you're looking for a reliable, no-nonsense tool to support your training journey you should give Mylo a try!