Abstract
An elite athlete is someone who trains and competes in a high-level sport and has greater physical performance and physical endurance. In the training process, elite athletes use high resistance strength training strategies causing fatigue in athletes. On the positive side, fatigue is considered as a stimulus for muscle adaptation and increased muscle performance; on the negative side, it can lead to overreaching to overtraining. Monitoring and training time of athletes is needed to ensure athletes are consistent with training and minimize the risk of maladaptation of training to injury. Monitoring with the self-report method can be done as a marker of the athlete’s fatigue symptoms. This study aims to describe the perceptions of elite athletes towards fatigue. This research design uses descriptive method with cross-sectional design. The subjects involved in this study were the elite athletes of West Java KONI who did the training for PON XX 2021. In this case, the subjects were 215 elite athletes with 36 martial arts, 51 teams, 9 ratings, 34 games, 85 measured. Three RPE Scale with the highest frequency, namely the 13 scale “somewhat hard” (n = 64 29.8%), the 17 “very hard” (n = 47 21.9%), followed by a 12 “between light and somewhat hard” (n = 24 11.2%). There are athletes who choose scale of 6 “no exertion at all” (n = 6 2.8%) and for scale of 20 “maximum exertion” (n = 2 0.9%). Also, there are three RPE Scale with the lowest frequency, namely the 20 “maximum exertion” scale (n = 2 0.9%), followed by scale 19 “extremely hard” (n = 2 0.9%) with the same score and scale 18 (n = 3 1.4%). In this study, the perception of fatigue of elite athletes in West Java using the RPE scale of 20 scales is 13 “somewhat hard” and 17 “very hard”. There is no significant difference between gender, sport, duration, and age in selecting this scale.

Keywords
perceived exertion, periodization, recovery