Components of Your Personal Trainer’s Fitness Assessment
As you go about your search for a Chicago personal trainer, it’s good to have an understanding of how exercise programming begins. And it begins with what is called a proper fitness assessment, which is typically performed by your certified 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 in Chicago 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.
What are the components of a fitness assessment? To begin with, these components are meant to evaluate the following areas of fitness:
- Body composition
- Cardiovascular endurance
- Flexibility
- Muscular endurance
- Muscular strength
- Agility
- Balance
- Coordination
- Power
- Reaction time
- Speed / dynamic mobility
Your personal Chicago trainer will be looking at each of these as he or she writes out the recommendations for the intensities and volumes of your workout exercises. Of course, the fitness assessment is going to be performed more than once: 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 the other objectives of your Chicago personal trainer’s first fitness assessment:
- To identify strengths and weaknesses that may affect the design of your program;
- To identify potential risks of injury, as well as contraindications before you get on with you program;
- To collect data that will serve in the future as a means of measuring improvement and rate of progress;
- To assist in identifying short-term, intermediate, and long-term training objectives;
- To assist in the determination of appropriate exercise intensities and volumes (That way, you’ll know that your trainer didn’t pull the number of your reps from the air!).
As your personal trainer performs the fitness assessment, he or she will give you certain instructions. These vary from trainer to trainer, but you can typically expect the following:
- Postural assessment, in which the trainer aims to look at the alignment of your body, from head to feet, as you stand up or walk;
- Movement analysis, in which your trainer takes notes on your ability to maintain proper joint alignment while performing, for example, squats, lunges, pull-ups, and pushups;
- Flexibility assessment, in which the trainer looks at which individual muscles or muscle groups need strengthening and lengthening; this is usually done by way of a set of stretching exercises.
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. Don’t worry if your Chicago personal trainer begins to measure folds of your skin using calipers; it’s all with the view of helping you set realistic and challenging training goals.
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 (a clinical measurement of how efficiently your body can use oxygen during aerobic exercise)
Given all these details, what can you, as a client, expect from the results of a fitness assessment as conducted by your Chicago 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.
