One of the best things you can do to your health is to keep a physically active lifestyle. If you hit the gym or engage in home exercises often, however, it is not unusual to wonder whether you are making progress. Either way, assessing your fitness level can help determine the types and levels of physical exercise you need to achieve optimal fitness. So, how do you determine your fitness level? Here are a few ways to tell how fit (or unfit) you are!
Join a Professional gym
In a professional gym, you get access to a certified fitness trainer. Apart from guiding you through your workouts, expert trainers help develop a training routine that best fits your fitness needs based on how physically fit you are. As you can tell from the GymNation UAE website, they also have a wide range of equipment, some of which assess important fitness metrics like your heart rate, breathing rate, endurance, and so forth as you work out.
Assess Your Body Composition
When your fitness level is wanting, you are more likely to have a lot of fat deposits in your body. This is often determined using the BMI or body mass index calculator or table. The BMI calculation takes into account, your weight in relation to your height to determine whether you’re lean, fit, overweight, or obese. The formula used is BMI = Weight (lbs) ÷ Height (square inches) X 703. Alternatively, you can use kg and m2.
The waist circumference is also a crucial factor in determining your fitness levels as far as body composition is concerned. If it’s greater than your hip circumference, you may want to start hitting the gym more.
Test Your Cardio Endurance
Also referred to as stress testing, cardio endurance testing is another way to determine your fitness. It simply assesses the efficiency of your heart and lungs in supplying oxygen throughout your body during workouts. The treadmill is specifically great at testing this, using tests like
- Exercise stress
- VO2 max test
- 12-min run test
Push-Ups and Core Strength Tests
This is called strength and endurance testing in other words, where you measure the maximum force exerted by specific muscle groups during exercise. Apart from pushups and core strength exercises, some trainers use a device called a metronome to measure how long you can last during a specific workout. So, how many pushups can you do in a session, and how many reps? The only way to tell is to get down and push it up!
Test Your Flexibility
The measure of how flexible your joints are can also help determine your fitness levels. Flexibility testing is done to determine the range of motion in various joints of the body, as well as how well your muscles coordinate with each other. Common tests include shoulder flexibility tests, trunk lift tests, and sit-reach tests, which measure flexibility in the shoulders, lower back, and limbs, respectively.
Physical fitness is vital if at all you want to lead a healthy and happy life. If you know how physically fit you are, you can determine your limits, fitness needs, and know the safety precautions to take when working out. The above are just a few ways you can tell how fit you are. Besides these, looking at yourself in the mirror or asking a friend could also give you a clue!