Fitness Assessment July 2012

Read this first.

Back In march was my last fitness assessment and there were a couple of things I discovered after a season of hockey that I wasn’t all that happy about.  My skin folds leapt up by about 10mm, which really is not that much, but the number looks big.  And my muscles are shrunk a bit.  We were focusing on plyo type exercises to keep short burst cardio things happening and not so much focused on strength.

I was happy with the workouts I was doing, but things like this seem to be cyclical.  If I work focused on cardio, strength drops, if I focus on strength cardio drops.  I think now with my current routine we’ve found that balance as I do my strength stuff at the gym, and my cardio things at home by running or biking.  There is a bit of plyo work at the gym still, but not as much as before.

So here are some numbers for you.

Now I’ve talked about my whole fitness assessment things before and how it really can give some nice things to track other than weight when you are trying to get in shape.  So if you want to read all that go here! As for this what are we seeing of importance.  You can see my weight is pretty consistent even since the June of 2010.  My waist has gotten “bigger” and the body fat percentage numbers change greatly at the end.  So.  The wait thing is something I find a bit misleading because Jodi takes that measurement right around my belly button, in going from 81-90cm I have not needed new pants or anything, but it’s my core muscles that have made that number change.  The low number there of 81cm I looked like this:

And now at 90cm I look like this:

It’s hard to even see the difference I think, in the waist area that is.  There are all sorts of other things I notice between those two pictures.

As for the body fat percentage, we do that on the scale they have at the gym with the electronics in the foot pads and all the numbers that are in the teen I am entered into the scale as a ‘normal’ body type.  It was not until the last two assessments that Jodi thought to change it to the ‘athletic’ body type, which I assume takes into account more muscle mass and density of the body in general.  So 7.7% is pretty awesome I would say.

This chart is Muscle measurements. Now as I was saying between September of 2011 and March of 2012 the focus for me was not really on building muscle and strength.  For instance I was not doing a bench press or a squat during that time.  And the affects of that show here with many of my muscles dropping by at least a cm and some up to 5cm!  Noticing that we shifted gears and started to work on building that strength back up again with the whole do squats and bench presses until you want to die thing and now with the push day and pull day so that I get a full body muscle workout each time I go to the gym.  That work clearly has paid off, as each of the new measurement are new highs or equal to previous bests.

You also will note the beep test and obstacle course levels and times and there are a few things to note here I think.  The beep test where I got to level 10.5 that is the only thing we did other than the measurements on that assessment day.  We didn’t have the time or access to the right gym to actually to the course.  I wasn’t exactly happy with 8.5 yesterday, but it was super hot all day and I did the obstacle course before the beep test, so I had already spent some time running.  The times for the obstacle course are either set out on that top line horizontally or in the last orange column vertically. (Why? you might be asking.  Because of the graphing dear readers, see the horizontal numbers there are actually “times” like 5:54.6am, where as the vertical chart of that has all sorts of formulas and junk to make the time in the last orange column equivalent to a passing of time, as in 5 minutes and 55 seconds (I rounded up)).  ANYWAYS!  That time dropped by about 20 seconds, and that too is awesome to gain that much time over such a short span of time.