Do you use the weighing scales or a tape measure to assess your physical condition? If so STOP! There are better metrics that you can use to get a measure of your health and fitness status. Research suggests that body size does not necessarily correspond to health and that when it comes to your cardiovascular and metabolic health and your overall risk of mortality, fitness is more important than fatness, according to an article published this week in the Irish Times.
Fitness means different things to different people and it helps to define what that word means to you. The Oxford dictionary defines fitness as “good health and strength achieved through exercise”. Lee Stoner, an assistant professor of exercise physiology in the U.S. says that from a physiological perspective, fitness could be defined as “how well your heart, lungs, and cardiovascular system delivers and uses oxygen”. While body composition is related to your health, fitness is fundamentally about how well your body functions, not the numbers on a scale or the size of your waist. Instead of focusing on aesthetics, you should prioritise your capabilities.
One of the most important metrics is one that you can track outside of the gym. For example, are you able to do the activities that you want to be able to do in your daily life without difficulty? Fitness gives you this capability. Setting and achieving workout goals is a simple and practical way to track and measure your fitness progress. A fitness test can provide you with an initial benchmark based on your current ability, to which you can compare future results. But choose a test that reflects your fitness goals. For instance, if you want to increase your core strength you might time how long you can hold a plank. For endurance, Amber Harris, a running and strength coach advises “as you progress in your training see how fast you can run a mile, or whether you can increase your mileage from one week to the next”.
If you want to build total body fitness, indoor rowing is one of the most complete and efficient workouts that you can do. Rowing is an exercise that builds endurance and strength with measurable results via a performance monitor (above) that tracks your power in watts, stroke rate, heart rate and much more. At Power-rowing I coach all of my customers to achieve a target goal of rowing 5000m, as this is a distance which requires a good level of fitness. You may have run a 5K but a 5K row is a very different workout. The popular gym-goers 500m row does NOT test your aerobic fitness!
Heart rate is one of the best ways to get a measure of your cardiovascular fitness. For example, the lower your resting heart rate is, the stronger your heart. Fewer beats mean your heart is working more efficiently, pushing the same amount of blood through the body with less effort. You can measure your heart rate while exercising and track how it changes from week to week. “As you get more fit, you’re going to see that the heart rate comes down at the same intensity of exercise,” says Chris Lundstrom, a lecturer in sport and exercise science at the University of Minnesota.
