Workshop: "Exercise tolerance: from functional indexes to individualised prescription"

The capacity to perform physical exercise of prolonged duration and adequate intensity (exercise tolerance) is essential to sustain effectively and independently the movement tasks related to work, leisure and activities of daily living and is a synthetic index of overall health. Furthermore, regular physical exercise has well-documented, dose-dependent, effects on maintenance and promotion of health throughout the life span. Therefore, the ability to acquire and adequate exercise “dose”, has indirect effects on the quality of life and long-term health maintenance and is instrumental to health promotion throughout life. The clarification of the physiological mechanisms that affect exercise tolerance and their possible sensitivity to exercise interventions is central to the identification of specific, effective and applicable countermeasures to attenuate exercise intolerance and to improve health and quality of life across the life span. In this workshop, we will present new data and insight on the physiological mechanism underpinning the reduction of movement economy as a function of exercise intensity and as a result of fatigue, contributing to exercise intolerance. Furthermore, we will present the concept of a landmark that demarcates heavy/sustainable from severe/unsustainable intensity domains and newly developed methods of measurement of exercise intensity boundaries. Finally, new data and considerations on the interchangeability of intensity indexes and their translation into a versatile and individualised exercise prescription will be presented, with a translational approach.