Book excerpt: With Perceived Exertion for Practitioners: Rating Effort With the OMNI Picture System,you'll have the most up-to-date, innovative way to rate clients' physical exertion in your professional practices. You'll be able to expand your knowledge of perceived exertion as used today by health and fitness specialists and clinical therapeutic practitioners, and you'll learn how to apply the newly developed OMNI Picture System of perceived exertion. Author and highly acclaimed researcher Robert Robertson developed the OMNI Picture System, which uses picture scales to enable exercisers to rate their exertion visually. In this text, Dr. Robertson presents real-life scenarios involving perceptually based exercise assessments and programming using the OMNI Scaling System. The scenarios focus on people with various training and conditioning needs, from improving personal health to developing recreational and competitive fitness. By rating their effort based on pictures of other exercisers, your clients will be able to accurately set and regulate their conditioning intensity using a target rating of perceived exertion (RPE) zone. Special features of Perceived Exertion for Practitionersinclude the following: -11 OMNI picture scales, which apply to all types of exercise and are reproducible for use as handouts, in fitness facilities, and in classrooms -Sample instructions on what to say to clients in various situations -Both clinical and field-based perceptual tests for use in aerobic, anaerobic, and resistance exercise assessments -Case studies that describe the clients' characteristics, identify the exercise need, and present an action plan to meet that need using RPE as the training zone -Actual programs for aerobic, anaerobic, and resistance training that employ OMNI Scale RPE zones to guide intensity Perceived Exertion for Practitionersgives you a broader understanding of perceived exertion, and you'll be able to apply what's in the text by using the 11 picture scales included. The text is a must-have for anyone looking for a better way to use ratings of perceived exertion to develop training programs.