Learn how to measure your physical fitness without using the scale – 01/04/2023 – Equilibrium

Exercising is one of the best things you can do for your mental and physical health. But often the only yardstick people use to gauge their progress is their weight. This is not the most accurate way to assess fitness and can be loaded with emotional baggage.

For starters, muscle mass is denser than fat. So if you do a lot of strength training, the numbers on the scale can go up the more you work out. Furthermore, research suggests that body size does not necessarily correlate with health.

“Physical fitness is more important to your cardiovascular and metabolic health than obesity. It’s also more important to your overall risk of morbidity and mortality,” says Lee Soner, associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. .

Luckily, there are more accurate (and less anxiety-inducing) criteria you can use to assess your health and fitness. Whether you’re a competitive athlete, someone who only works out on the weekends, or a beginner, here are some expert-recommended ways to assess your fitness level.

heart health measures

To measure your physical fitness, it’s helpful to start by defining what that term means to you. From a physiological point of view, physical fitness can be defined as “how well the heart, lungs and cardiovascular system deliver and use oxygen,” says Stoner.

The easiest way to assess this is with heart rate. Most smartwatches on the market measure heart rate relatively well, although there are some concerns that the products are not equally accurate for darker skinned people. You can also measure your heart rate manually, on your wrist or around your neck, by counting the number of beats you detect in 15 seconds and multiplying that number by four.

Resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you are not exerting yourself physically. The better your cardiovascular fitness, the lower your resting heart rate is likely to be because your heart will be able to pump more blood with each beat. Fewer beats mean the heart is working more efficiently, pumping the same amount of blood around the body with less effort.

A normal resting heart rate for healthy adults is between 60 and 80 beats per minute. Athletes typically have a lower resting rate, which can sometimes drop below 60. If your resting rate is above 80, regular aerobic exercise can help you bring it down over time.

You can also measure yours after an exercise session and monitor how it changes from week to week, especially if you frequently follow the same exercise routine, such as a regular class or running a fixed path in your neighborhood.

“As your physical fitness improves, you’ll find that your heart rate with the same exercise intensity goes down,” says Christopher Lundstrom, professor of sport and exercise science at the University of Minnesota. “So heart rate is a good yardstick and it’s something anyone can easily measure.”

Another heart rate-related criterion worth keeping an eye on is variability, which can be assessed using more advanced smartwatches or an activity tracker. Variability measures how much your heart rate fluctuates from one beat to the next. The higher, the better your cardiovascular health.

We often think of the heart as a metronome, beating in a regular rhythm, but in reality there are slight variations in the length of each beat and the intervals between them. “Very low variability at rest shows that the heart is working hard just to keep working properly,” Lundstrom points out. “The greater your physical fitness, the more your heart is able to quickly adapt and adjust to different demands.

VO2 max (maximum oxygen volume) is the most accurate assessment of cardiorespiratory health. It measures the ability of the heart and lungs to take in oxygen, distribute it throughout the body, and convert it into cellular energy. This test is usually done in a laboratory and requires special equipment that most people don’t have access to, but there are tests you can do at home — like the three-minute step test — that can give you a rough estimate.

exercise goals

Physical fitness can also be defined as “metrics of performance and maximization of strength, power and endurance,” says Lundstrom. Setting and achieving exercise goals is perhaps the most concrete strategy for tracking your progress in terms of strength and endurance.

Fitness tests are a useful way to do this because they give you a baseline performance benchmark – based on your ability, not someone else’s – against which you can compare future results.

When you start a new training program, choose a test that reflects your fitness goals. For example, if you want to increase your abdominal strength, you can measure how long you can stay in a plank position. If your goal is to improve your overall fitness, count how many burpees you can do in a set amount of time.

Complete the test in the first workout session to determine your starting level. Then repeat the test every month to see how much progress you’ve made. As your strength and cardiovascular fitness increase, you should be able to complete more reps or beat your starting time.

Another way to measure strength gains is how much weight you can use in an isolated movement like a biceps curl. If you are gradually increasing the weight and you are still doing the movement safely and correctly, you can assume that your muscle is getting stronger.

To assess endurance, running and strength coach Amber Harris of Kansas City, Kansas, has her clients focus on speed and distance. She usually has beginners start with interval training, where they run for one minute and then walk for two. To monitor endurance in this phase, she measures how far the client can cover in their one-minute intervals and challenges them to increase their intervals by running for two, three, or four minutes before slowing down and walking.

Speed ​​and distance are equally important for more experienced runners. Harris recommends that as you progress through your practice, see how long it takes you to run a mile and whether you can increase the distance you run from one week to the next.

“These are all ways you can gauge whether you’re getting better without worrying about ‘Is my waist shrinking? Are my clothes shrinking?'” says Harris. “In the larger scheme of things, that’s not important to me.”

Another useful criterion is how difficult you find the training. Are you panting afterwards or is the workout easy? Coaches call this the Perceived Exertion, also known as the RPE or Borg scale.

The RPE ranges from 1 to 10, with 1 being virtually no effort and 10 being the maximum effort you can maintain for a short period of time. For an RPE of 5 or less, you should be able to participate in a conversation, albeit with increasing difficulty. Six or more is more tiring, and your breathing should be labored. You’ll know your cardiovascular fitness is improving if an exercise that you would have previously rated RPE 8 drops to RPE 5.

According to Lundstrom, RPE has “proved to be a very useful yardstick for monitoring a person over time. I coach a lot of athletes, and as much as I specialize in sports science, I’m still interested in how they felt — probably more than any other data.”

everyday activities

When it comes to exercising to benefit your health and lifestyle, the most important criteria may be those you notice outside the gym, such as whether you can easily carry your child or climb three flights of stairs. stairs without getting out of breath.

Certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor Jamie Carbaugh frequently works with seniors. She defines physical fitness with a question: “Are you able to perform the roles you want to be able to perform in your life?”

Rather than focusing on aesthetics, his clients – the oldest is 105 years old – prioritize capability. For example, a woman wanted to improve her stamina so she could walk down the aisle at her granddaughter’s wedding.

Justice Williams, director and head trainer at Fitness4AllBodies, said one of his clients knew she had made progress because she was able to lift her suitcase into the overhead bin of an airplane without having to ask anyone for help.

“She was so excited about it that when she got off the plane and went to the hotel she called me and told me,” he says. “That’s autonomy, you know? ‘I was able to do this on my own without asking for help and it felt really good.'”

Translated by Clara Allain