Purpose of Health Screening & Fitness Assessment
- Screens
- Identifies individuals at risk
- Documents known and unknown disabilities and impairments
- Therapy or medical referral may be provided for treatable conditions
- Assesses
- Identifies need for specific exercise prescription
- Detects strengths and weaknesses
- Predicts
- Identifies expected outcomes
- Set goals
- Monitors
- Checks efficacy of program
- Initial testing establishes a baseline for future testing
- Changes to program can be made based in part from the results of future testing
General Procedures
- Pretesting
- ACSM Risk Classification Form or Exercise Readiness Questionnaire
- Lifestyle and Medical Questionnaire
- Informed Consent
- Choose appropriate fitness test
- Consider availability of equipment, testing environment, goals of assessment, age and physical limitations of subject
- Note tests validity, reliability, sensitivity, acceptability, and practicality
- Norms should be derived from population similar to subject
- Test and retest conditions should be similar
- Time of day, equipment, fatigue, motivation, etc
- Same tester (particularly for skinfold and circumferences tests where inter-tester reliability is high)
- Delivery of test instructions
- Appropriate warm-ups & cooldowns
- Stretching before strength and power assessment may decrease performance for up to one hour (Evetovich 2003, Young 2003) and may not decrease occurrence of injury (See Stretching and Flexibility)
- Follow logical order of fitness tests to decrease fatigue's effect on test performance
- Terminate test if indications are observed
Also see Procedures for the Administration of a Graded Exercise Test and YMCA fitness Tests
Causes of Fitness Testing Error
- Subject
- Motivation, Fatigue
- Bodyweight variations other than body composition from test to retest:
- Varied hydration and ingested food
- different time of day or altered diet
- exercising or physical activity before test
- Different clothes worn
- Varied hydration and ingested food
- Technician
- Experience with technique
- Lack of standardization
- Encouragement given to subject
- Tester bias
- Equipment
- Calibration
- Appropriate fit to subject
- Environment
- Room temperature (indoor), weather (outdoor), time of day, distractions
Clinical Exercise Tests
- Death rate for clinical exercise lab test ~1 / 20,000 tests
- ~1 / 50,000 risk of dying during exercise
- Always have emergency drugs and equipment available
- A physician may need to be present for higher risk individuals