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Assessing Your Overall Health

By February 24, 2015March 7th, 2019Exercise

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Have you completed a fitness assessment lately?

There are many assessment protocols out there, but the key is finding one relevant to your goals. If you’re training for a specific assessment, such as a firefighter physical ability test for example, you probably know exactly what you must do to pass. But, what about the average person who just wants a standard to test themselves against?

Some common areas to assess are cardiovascular efficiency, muscular endurance, muscular strength, flexibility, circumference measurements, and body composition. Your performance or score in each of these areas paints a picture about yourself and your overall health.

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has an adult fitness test that sets some standards for the common adult. It’s not overly thorough, but may give you a general idea of how you stack up in these areas of fitness.

Aerobic Endurance. This test consists of either a 400 meter walk, a 1 mile walk, or a 1.5 mile jog/run. Choose the appropriate test based on your current fitness level. This test measures how efficiently you utilize the oxygen you take in with each breath. If you’re lungs and heart can utilize more oxygen at any intensity, then you can maximize your output at those different intensity levels and get more work done – move faster or farther in a set time frame.

Muscular Strength and Endurance. To test these aspects, you’ll be performing pushups and situps. These tests may vary slightly based on your sex but your individual score is always relative. Keep in mind, this test will give you an idea of your muscular strength and endurance but only in the movements being measured. So, if you run often for example, you may have great muscular endurance in your legs, but you may score low on the pushup test due to a lack of training the upper body.

Flexibility. This test consists of the well-known sit and reach where you’re in a seated position with your legs extended while attempting to reach towards or past your toes. Again, it’s one aspect of flexibility but gives you a general idea of how well the muscles of the legs and back allow the hips to move through a specific range of motion.

Personal Statistics. These areas of testing could include height, weight, BMI, body composition, and circumference measurements, such waist and hip size. For the adult fitness test, you’ll be entering your height, weight, and waist circumference and it will give you a score based on those 3 areas. Another important test to consider is measuring your body fat percentage. One goal of exercise is to not only achieve and maintain a healthy weight, but to improve the muscle vs. fat composition of that weight. With proper exercise, your lean mass should increase as your fat mass decreases. So, measuring your weight and your body fat percentage will tell you much more information that just stepping on a scale from week to week.

So if you’re wondering where your current fitness level ranks, check out the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports website and enter your stats from the above tests or contact us for a complimentary assessment.