Assessments
How Do You Know?
Is your training program getting you the results you're looking for?
In this section I've put together some easy-to-do fitness and performance assessments so you can see how you're doing. Each assessment is designed to give you feedback on a specific area of fitness and performance. Use these at the beginning of your training program to establish a baseline. Then, periodically re-assess yourself to see the progress you're making as you move closer to your goals.
Assessment Categories
Your mobility determines how well you move through a given range of motion, such as a squat, a lunge or reaching overhead. Mobility is not just about your flexibility though, it's also about your stability and your motor control.
Can you move efficiently?
Can you move in a fashion that allows you to be strong and injury resistant?
So why is this important? Good mobility protects joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles from excessive grinding and unnecessary strain and torque. This allows every muscle to do the job it was intended to do and in turn allow you to truly utilize the endurance, the strength, and the power that you've worked so hard in the gym to achieve.
All Day! Every Day!
Endurance is your ability to sustain a given workload for an extended period of time. It also plays a role in your ability to recover quicker during your workout sessions, between sets or intervals for example. As you get deeper into your workout program and the intensity of each workout increases, good endurance will improve the quality of your exercise technique by keeping fatigue levels low allowing you to perform better during your workouts.
Now You See Me, Now You Don't!
Your agility determines how well you can stop, start, and change directions and it's not just for athletes. Agility training is a great way to strengthen muscles in all three planes of motion, improve balance, body awareness and control. It also creates a fun and challenging element to your workouts that requires high metabolic demands and burns a lot of calories. Both good, right? Of course.
"King Kong Ain't Got Nothin' On Me!"
Strength! The back bone of why most of us workout at all. We want to be stronger! Being strong provides many physical and psychological benefits; improved muscularity, and athleticism, and of course, a better looking body. Strength also gives us confidence, a feeling of "capableness" and a general improvement in well-being.
How strong do you want to be?
How strong do you need to be?
Here Comes The BOOM!