Want to kick off your new year with a brand new exercise routine? Great! There’s just one thing you should do before getting started, and that’s a fitness assessment.
What is a Fitness Assessment?
A fitness assessment is simply just a way for your personal trainer to evaluate your base level of fitness. Every personal trainer will measure different things, but a good rule of thumb to follow is your height, weight, resting blood pressure, heart rate, body composition, upper body strength, endurance levels, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness.
While it may sound slightly intimidating or confronting, taking a fitness assessment before starting a new exercise program is really nothing to worry about. It also has many benefits!
Here are 5 reasons why is it important to assess your fitness level:
1. They help your Trainer help you
Fitness assessments identify your physical strengths and weaknesses. For example, you might have great stamina and endurance to complete cardio workouts, but limited upper body strength. Your trainer can use this knowledge to build a suitable fitness routine that will amplify your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.
2. Evaluating your fitness level can help establish attainable fitness goals.
To set realistic fitness goals you should assess your current level of fitness. You may set attainable goals for enhancing your physical fitness and health by being aware of where you stand right now in these areas. This may take into account a number of things, including your stamina or cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, flexibility, and body composition. Instead of creating goals that could be too difficult or impossible to achieve, you can make goals that are hard but attainable by assessing your level of fitness.
3. They identify any potential health risks or areas of injury
Exercise-related injuries are unfortunately a very common occurrence, particularly for beginners. Fitness assessments can’t eliminate your chance of injury entirely, but they will certainly help your trainer diagnose any potential weak areas so that they can be monitored more closely. They may also help you to recognise health risks you weren’t aware of before.
4. They can establish goals or be used as motivation
What better way to set some attainable goals than to see where you need improvement? Recording your initial fitness levels will motivate you to train harder and work towards being the best you, you can be.
5. They will kick start your fitness tracking
While you will see and feel the improvements to your body, it’s important to track them on paper (or online) as well. Getting an assessment is a great way to begin this tracking process because it will provide a full documentation of your starting body measurements or body scan and fitness levels for you to look back on each week/month.
Book a free consultation with us today and start working towards your new fitness goals.
