Arena Fitness

Your First Fitness Assessment

As you find a personal trainer for you, it’s good to have an understanding of how exercise programming begins. And it begins with what is called a proper fitness assessment, which can be typically performed by your certified, Arena Fitness, personal trainer.

The fitness assessment basically measures your current fitness levels, and determines if you are prone to certain health risks that may become an issue in your fitness training. It’s also a means of helping your personal trainer to gather data about how fit you are, and what your body can take, which will then be used as a basis for developing an individualized program, identifying training goals and objectives, and maximizing the efficiency of the time you’ll be spending at the gym.

Components of your Personal Trainer’s Health Assessment

What are the components of a fitness assessment?  Depending on what level of fitness you may be at, certain components may be tested first.  The variety of components may be tested depending on what level of fitness you may be at now and what goals you wish to improve.  These include:

• Body composition
• Cardiovascular endurance
• Flexibility
• Muscular endurance
• Muscular strength
• Agility
• Balance
• Coordination
• Power
• Reaction time
• Speed (dynamic mobility)

Your personal trainer may look at each of these as he or she writes out the recommendations for the intensities and volumes of your workout exercises. Fitness assessments may be performed more than once: perhaps every three or four months, or whatever is suitable enough for your personal trainer to be able to monitor your progress. That way, you will also be able to know if the hard work you’re putting at the gym is paying off.

Here are some other objectives of your Arena Fitness personal trainer’s first fitness assessment:

• Identify strenghts and weaknesses that may affect the design of your program
• Identify potential risks of injury
• Collect data that will serve in the future as a means of measuring improvement and rate of progress
• Assist in identifying short-term, intermediate, and long-term training objectives.
• Assist in the determination of appropriate excercise intensities and volumes.

A certified personal trainer will also be measuring your body composition (or body fat percentage), which should guide you as you make decisions regarding your diet and exercise program.

Other components that may be included as the trainer assesses your fitness levels are:

• Resting heart rate
• Target heart rate zone
• Blood pressure
• Body mass index
• VO2 Max
• Diet, Nutrition and Lifestyle plans

Given all these details, what can you, as a client, expect from the results of a fitness assessment as conducted by your Arena Fitness personal trainer? One is that you’ll be able to determine if your diet is consistent with your training and fitness goals. The assessment will also let you know if your program is delivering the results that you’re looking for: have you been working out hard enough? Are you right on track, or do you feel like you need more kinds of exercise in addition to your training session? Is your current diet supporting the work that you’ve done at the gym?

The answers to these questions – and more – are not possible without the fitness assessment. So play an active part as your personal trainer works to find out what it takes to help you live a healthy and fit lifestyle.