James Steele

Despite its apparent intuitiveness and widespread interest across various fields, ‘effort’ is a concept that seems difficult to define. The purpose of this article is to consider and define ‘effort’ during attempted task performance. In doing so I argue for distinction between the actual effort (objective effort) required, and the perception of that effort (subjective effort), during intentionally attempted task performance. I adopt a set theoretical approach to defining the intensional concepts, and extensional phenomenal constructs, and employ the tradition of Theory-Theory to illustrate tentative causal theories for and relating the concepts. The definitions I propose are deliberately agnostic of the specific task demands being attempted (e.g. physical, cognitive, self-control, or a combination) and thus reflect ‘general’ definitions of effort and its perception. Throughout, I draw upon and synthesise literature from across a multitude of disciplines, combining empirical evidence with armchair philosophising, and offer what insights I have from my own experience both as someone experiencing ‘effort’, and as a third-person observer investigating it. This work is intended to, at the very least, make my own current pretheoretical conceptualisation and understanding of ‘effort’ transparent to other researchers, and aid interpretation of subsequent empirical work, theory building, and theory testing on the topic. Further, I hope it might be useful to researchers across various fields, unify paradigms and help with integration of learnings across disciplines, and further understanding of the role of ‘effort’ and its perception from a broad scientific perspective.

In resistance training, the use of predicting proximity to momentary task failure, and repetitions in reserve scales specifically, is a growing approach to monitoring and controlling effort. However, its validity is reliant upon accuracy in the ability to predict MF which may be affected by congruence of the perception of effort compared with the actual effort required. The present study examined participants with at least 1 year of resistance training experience predicting their proximity to MF in two different experiments using a deception design. Within each experiment participants performed four trials of knee extensions with single sets to their self-determined repetition maximum and MF. For the first experiment participants used loads equal to 70% of a one repetition maximum performed in a separate baseline session. Aiming to minimize participants between day variability in repetition performances, in the second separate experiment they used loads equal to 70% of their daily isometric maximum voluntary contraction. Results suggested that participants typically under predicted the number of repetitions they could perform to MF with a meta-analytic estimate across experiments of 2.0 [95%CIs 0.0 to 4.0]. Participants with at least 1 year of resistance training experience are likely not adequately accurate at gauging effort in submaximal conditions. This suggests that perceptions of effort during resistance training task performance may not be congruent with the actual effort required. This has implications for controlling, programming, and manipulating the actual effort in resistance training and potentially on the magnitude of desired adaptations such as improvements in muscular hypertrophy and strength.