Name: Chapter 11 - Health, Wellness, and Fitness Assessments
Uploaded: 2025-05-08T07:48:16.000Z
Duration: 44 min 44 s
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Welcome, everybody, to chapter 11 of the NASM Essentials of Personal Fitness Training manual reference here.

We're looking at chapter 11 again today, and this is going to be about the true start of assessment, all right?

Assessment being critical for many different things, including being able to find a baseline for everything.

You find your baseline, and then you move forward.

So we're talking here about the health, wellness, and fitness parts of everything.

Chapter 12 will expand upon this a little bit more, get a little bit more into the performance side of everything.

So let's start here, and let's rock and roll through this.

So again, with anything else, we're trying to, you know, again, we're trying to find this baseline that we're talking about.

But again, trying to find any risk that might be there, any inherent risk that might be there, like it says, of cardiovascular, pulmonary, and metabolic diseases, signs and symptoms, anything like that.

If any of that is present at that point, yeah, we need to make sure that we get doctor orders to clear, or it could be a lot more challenging.

Also with assessments, we're looking at that underlying word right there, contraindications.

Aspects that will not allow you to complete a specific movement, that sort of contraindication is something that goes against what you should be doing.

So again, not just physical contraindications, but also medical contraindications.

So it could be anything from a previous injury to a medication that you might be on.

It just depends on what it is that you're actually working with in that moment.

So also we want to make sure that we're not basically doing too much work for what we're trying to achieve.

And by that, unwarranted medical evaluations, if we don't need to do those and we can avoid it at all costs, then we will.

We also want to make sure that we get those recommendations for an initial set of activities that someone can do.

So again, finding that baseline, what we're going to do is be able to give out information to the client and to ourselves to then prep them for what is going to be coming up, what level they're going to start at, if they've come with previous experience, if they have never worked out before, anything along those lines.

Also making sure about what they know about their current condition.

We can educate our people about what they are currently working with because that's really critical.

Sometimes we don't educate our people enough to where they are currently.

Again, the program evaluation, if we don't do follow-up types of things, we can't evaluate how that program is working and what we need to do.

And then lastly, the assessment can actually help with goal setting.

If you see where you're currently at, it makes it easier to set something moving forward and not be too unrealistic with that, especially when we start talking about SMART goals.

So the first step in the assessment process typically is your pre-participation screenings.

That's basically before you start doing any movements, you're going to determine where these people's level of health are.

So typically we would do things like health history questionnaires, we would do things like PAR-Qs, and these are going to give us a screen to see where certain conditions are, if that person's healthy, if they need any additional medical advice.

We're just trying to get more from them from that.

It's not overly detailed, we're just trying to get as much information as we can without overwhelming them.

So the first one here we talked about is a PAR-Q, a Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire, or what we call a PAR-Q.

Now there's a PAR-Q Plus that goes on to be a little bit longer than this that has a little bit more detail.

Now this right here, the regular standard PAR-Q has been around for a while.

If you look, it says 2011, it's a very simple seven question, yes or no style.

And if you answer yes to any of those questions, then we need to be able to figure out what needs to happen next.

Now typically, this was the standard, PAR-Q was just the standard, and it was a yes and no, yes and no, yes and no for seven different options.

If you answered yes, then typically you had to go and get medical clearance by a physician or your primary care, whoever it may be.

And then from there, what you would end up with is that clearance to get them to start working here.

A PAR-Q Plus, all right, a PAR-Q Plus has an additional set of circumstances that come after it where you're going to answer a lot of different questions.

And so because of that, you end up with a lot more detail, especially if they did answer yes on certain parts.

If they answer no, then there isn't really, you don't necessarily have to move on to that plus part of the PAR-Q, so that's also an option as well.

But sometimes that plus part can be good for even the healthier people because it shows you a lot more detail in terms of, well, anything from where they're currently at health-wise to there might be one little thing in there that might not be too important, but it might be something that could be worked on as a goal later on.

So the second part that we want to refer to is a health history questionnaire.

Okay, now a PAR-Q is very cut and dry, all right, yes and no's.

And then again, if you have to, you can move to the second part of everything and that would help you to be able to determine where you should be starting at, where you need to keep moving through.

Now a health history questionnaire is exactly that.

This is kind of along the lines of what you might find at a doctor's office.

It's one of those things where you're going to get more information out of somebody just because we want to be more clear about who they are as a person.

So the clearer the picture that we can paint, the better off we are when it comes to that.

Okay, and that's really going to be of utmost importance at that point.

Now the health history questionnaire, again, age, gender, height, weight, you know, very demographic style information.

They give, you know, and then some emergency contacts.

That's always very important just in case something happens.

Then we get into more lifestyle based types of things and then medical history as well.

Now all those really, again, give you the most amount of detail for what we're trying to achieve at that point, okay?

You've gone through, you've taken care of the paperwork side of everything and we all have our opinion about paperwork and everything like that, but it's important.

It really is because if you don't have the details and you don't have the information that will help you support those details, then it makes it more challenging when someone's like, oh yeah, by the way, I had a heart attack two years ago and I'm minimized on, you know, what I can and cannot do in my workouts.

Well, if that's the case, you could have figured that out, you know, a while ago and saved yourself a lot of time.

So that's why we do these things up front.

It's not just to just do paperwork and make everybody's lives really frustrating.

It's just that's the way that it needs to be is that we have to get all that info up front so we can make a better choice later on.

So really what we want to think about here when we're doing these are there's four major things.

There's relevance, appropriateness, validity, and reliability.

Now really quickly kind of hitting on those things.

Is it associated with the topic that we're talking about?

You know, is it relevant to what, you know, is it basically trying to do what we want it to do?

Are we giving the right assessments for the right things?

Validity means that, you know, what, whatever we decide to do for testing, is it valid?

Meaning that is it aimed to test what it's meant to test?

So if you're, if you're eventually going to give somebody a one and a half mile run test, that's a valid test.

That means it's going to aim to measure your cardiorespiratory fitness.

Now reliability on the other hand, is, is it repeatable?

So a lot of times we want to stick with assessments that we know that we can repeat, especially if we're going to do things like follow ups and pre post tests and things like that, because that's hypercritical because that means that we can repeat it and it doesn't have to require 19 different steps that if you mess one step up, you're in trouble.

Now there are specifics that we really want to make sure that we pay attention to.

And this is definitely something that's most likely going to end up on a test of some sort.

We want to make sure that we do all of the very static types of things first before we get into the physical part of anything.

So things like resting heart rate, blood pressure, and body composition testing, which will be discussed in chapter 12, you know, in more detail.

Those are things that we want to do first because if we do them after exercise, obviously our resting heart rate isn't going to be true.

Our blood pressure is going to be off and actually it'll affect your body composition more than you actually think it may.

So especially if you have certain type of equipment that you use as well, like if you use like a BIA, a bioelectrical impedance analyzer, that can skew you because you become dehydrated and it can throw off your numbers.

So really anything that is non-physical exertion would come first.

And then after that, we would then go into the things that we would test for aerobic conditioning, strength, and power.

So it would go static and then move it into our dynamic assessments that are, again, I say static, but we understand that we're saying non-exercise and exercise-based assessments.

So the non-exercise-based ones come first because they can't be skewed by the exercise.