This is a picture Rachel and I took back in January '08, when she was living in Miller Apartments. It was a while ago. But, in addition, it's been a while since I've regularly exercised in my life. I'd say that the last time I regularly exercised was on my mission when I biked all day long. I was on bike for almost half my mission. After I got home, not much working out at all. So I've been pretty sedentary since then.Anyway, I've been taking this Fit For Life class this semester. I talked about it in an earlier post. Back in January when I had just began running and stuff, I took a fitness assessment that assessed how "fit" I was statistically according to my age. I just finished my followup fitness assessment. I thought I'd report my successes!
- BMI: To start off, they took a waist to hip ratio. This test isn't super accurate, but it's much more expensive to do the better ones. So for my BMI, I burnt an inch of fat on my waist and an inch on my hips for a score of 19.2, which is normal. It puts me at low risk for cardiovascular disease.
- My Heart Rate and Blood Pressure: pretty much the same. But, I'm not sure how accurate their reading was because my heart rate was a little high when they took it.
- % Body Fat: They took a skin fold test. Once again, not incredibly accurate, but not as expensive. I lost 4mm of fat on my thigh, which was good. Overall I lost 1% body fat. I'm now at 12%. This is really good. For men, you must have at least 3-5% body fat to survive, but an athletic man can have anywhere from 5-13%. So this was good!
- Flexibility: They had me sit and reach, pushing a standard along a scale. Before I didn't do so hot, but now I've improved by 5cm. This is good. Even still, I'm pretty average.
- Push-ups: Before I could do 22 before I got pooped. Now I can do 32. That's good, I guess. According to my age group 19-24 is average (50th percentile). 32 is excellent on their scale (80th percentile). I've decided to do more push-ups to build my muscular endurance now.
- Curl-ups: These are like crunches, where I reach my hands about two inches past a line on the floor. I was given 1 minute to do as many as I could. Before I could do 47, which was in the 80th percentile for men my age. Now though, 59! Which is in the 90th percentile!
- Bench Press: I increased my max bench by 10lbs! This was a great success for me, because I've never really been super muscular. But, I'm going to keep working on it!
- VO2 Max: this is a measurement of how well I utilize the oxygen I uptake into my body. Before I was average, now I'm still average, but I did improve a bit. According to the test, I'm up-taking about 2ml/min more oxygen than before. I know it doesn't really mean anything to most anyone. That's good though.
