The CoActive Health Journey – Part 2 – Physical Assessment
Once you have started to lay the foundations of robust good health through implementing good basic habits you will have the resilience to start training your body in a more focused manner. This should start with a physical assessment to establish where you are starting from.
The foundation to optimal performance is sound structural balance. This incurs that your relative joint mobility and strength ratios are balanced for optimal health and performance.
The CoActive assessment will establish where your movement deficiencies lie and your program will be designed with these in mind.
Here at CoActive we cover the following fundamentals:
- Body composition
- Movement Screen
- Sub maximal Strength testing
Body composition
Here at CoActive Health, we track our clients body composition through the ‘Strength and metabolic software’ devised by the late Charles Poliquin. This is the most sophisticated software of its type and provides the most accurate skin calliper algorithms on the market. The result is that our measurements are usually within 0.5% of Dexascan measurements which are the gold standard.
Once we have taken your skin folds this will tell us your current body fat % along with your lean mass. This is especially important if you are on a weight loss journey. Too often people sabotage there long term results through taking extreme short term weight loss measures – these can result in a loss of lean mass, a slowing of metabolism and ultimately weight re-gain. By monitoring your body composition and subsequent weight changes we can advise accordingly to ensure the weight you are losing is fat mass not precious muscle tissue!
Purely from a health perspective, we aim to have everybody below 20% body fat who trains with us. From here sub 16% for females and sub 12% for males are excellent performance goals.
One of the major advantages of taking skin calliper measurements is that they indicate what your fat distribution is like over the whole body. How and where you store body fat gives us clues into your hormonal profile. For example a lean Tricep reading correlates strongly to healthy testosterone levels where as a high supra iliac reading (above your hips) indicates an issue with blood sugar and insulin management.
With this added depth of insight we can further refine a clients diet and lifestyle to accelerate results.
Movement Screen
In an ideal world everybody would move as freely and easily as when they were a child. Observe any 3 year old effortlessly go into a perfect full squat, then try to replicate it. Your likely appreciate that modern life has taken its toll on your mobility! The reality is we simply don’t move as much as we should and this has consequences.
Tight hip flexors often are a precursor to lower back pain, where’s forward (protracted) shoulders can lead to bad posture and neck dysfunction.
With a thorough movement screen we can help identify if you have any of these common issues and then subsequently prescribe the appropriate strength exercises and stretches to bring you back into balance.
Sub Maximal Strength Testing
Once we have assessed your body composition and movement we will test you current strength levels. “Strength is the mother of all qualities” so said Tudar Bompa the father of strength training periodisation. Here at CoActive we are huge believers in getting our clients strong!
Regardless of your training goals be it fat loss or running a marathon, you will benefit from being stronger. Getting the body strong lays a great foundation for all other means of training and exercise. Depending on your experience we will assess your starting strength levels to help us to plan your programs moving forward.
Having been assessed you are now ready to start training in earnest, most likely on a structural balance phase of training to help prime the body for the more intense work to come!
Additional Support
If you have have any questions or would like to book in for a complimentary discovery call, get in touch using the form below.