Assessing your fitness level

Let’s talk about assessing your fitness level. So, I think that assessing your fitness level is a great way to get started on your fitness journey. It’s a great way to identity some areas where you can probably get some quick results, really see some progress that will help improve your day to day life. So why wouldn’t you want to kick start that journey, right?

There’s a few different types of assessments that exist, I’m gonna talk through those really quickly.

The first one is just an everyday fitness assessment, this is really focusing on easy and pain free movement in daily life. I will come back to this one again because I want to dive a little bit deeper into this one ’cause I think that’s why most of you have jumped on this video.

Then there are also other fitness assessment which I will talk about quickly here.

So there are job specific assessments, so for example if you are looking to join the military or want to become a police officer or something like that there are going to be certain fitness assessments that those institutions do in order to make sure you are fit for the job. In this case the most important thing is to practise the assessment. So whatever the assessment is and depending on how close you are to passing or failing that assessment you want to include that in your exercise routine at least, I would say probably once a week, if not maybe even twice a week if you are really struggling with it – to perform those specific exercises, ’cause the best way to get good at an exercise is to practise that exercise. We’ll leave that there, there is obviously a lot more detail we can go into but I don’t want to take up the whole day.

Then you have sports specific assessments as well. So here the assessment should focus on specific functional movements for the sport. So obviously if you think about basketball versus football versus hockey there’s a lot of different functional movement patterns and a lot of different ways to express force and power in your body through these different sports. Make sure that if you are doing a sports assessment that it is specific to your sport.

Then you also have a nutritional assessment. For this, at the very least, you would have to track your food for a week or two – including, liquids as well. Measure everything out, weight everything out and then someone with a nutritionist license can have a look at that and help you out and dial your nutrition.

And then last but not least you could also do a mindset assessment. This one’s a little but tricky for some people, you have to really open up and be willing to be vulnerable. This can be with a professional, it could also just be with a coach if your coach is open to that. The point is to be able to express yourself, talking, get some good feedback and good coach will tell you when it’s beyond their capabilities.

Same thing goes for the nutrition assessment if you have a all encompassing coach working with you on training, nutrition, mindset, etc. a good coach will tell you when they have reached their limits and when you need to seek the advice of somebody else and hopefully they can recommend somebody.

Okay, let’s spin back to everyday fitness. So everyday fitness assessments are fantastic for assessing you fitness level and yeah really helping to improve your everyday life.

An everyday fitness assessment should have a focus on functional movement, movements that you use in your everyday life. So when I say this, really what we are looking at is locomotion, so your ability to move. You are walking to your car, you are asking around the grocery store, maybe taking a bike ride – being able to move from a to b is critical in everyday life. We are looking at level changes, this is reaching up, bending down to pick something up, basically your ability to – in very over simplified terms – your ability to bend your knees and hinge your hips and squat, that kind of movement as well as reaching up. Level changes. Then you also want to look at your push-pull mechanics. How many times a day do you open and close a door or push a stroller or let’s go back to the grocery store, you maybe pull open that door, you maybe push the trolly around the store – yeah, you are pushing and pulling all the time. And the last one is rotational. This one from a everyday fitness point of view is huge because when you look at people throwing out there backs and such, I would argue that more often then not this is caused by some sort of rotational movement. Like you are picking up a heavy bag out of the back seat of your car and you kind of yank it out and around and throw out your back. Rotation also happens all the time in your regular life – if you are sitting around the dinner table and you are passing something from your left to your right, you are constantly rotating. So those are the major functional movements that any everyday fitness assessment should look at. The assessment should then, based on the results, be personalised and specific to you and any target areas that you are weaker in and need to improve in order to create stability through your whole body and remove imbalances in your body.

So basically when looking at the locomotion, level changes, push-pull and rotation you want to be looking for things such as basic stability, mobility, coordination, control, imbalances and strength. If you hit those pillars then you’ve got a great assessment and if you have a personalised and specific training protocol based off of that then you have a great way forward.

Now I wouldn’t be doing myself justice with this video if I didn’t mention that if this is something that sounds interesting to you and something you would like to do, I do offer a everyday fitness assessment, I call it the “Movement for Life Assessment” through my website where I will go through do exactly what I just explained for you. Create a personalised and specific protocol for stability, mobility, coordination, control, imbalances & strength based on your locomotion, level changes, push-pull and rotation. So I have taken all that into account so I will drop that link in the bottom under this video and if that is something you are interested in then I am happy to help, otherwise I hope you enjoyed the video here and can implement some practical everyday functional movements into your training program.