By: Aurelie Mok

Knowing your fitness level is important for your health! Whether you are about to start a fitness program or already accustomed to daily training, knowing your fitness level helps you to get the most efficient use of your exercise sessions and avoid overtraining or undertraining. Thus, you can set your fitness goals, hit the gym and track your progress!

Many believed that fitness evaluation is only based on the muscular strength. However this is definitely NOT true! Fitness evaluation is also founded on cardiovascular endurance, joint flexibility and your body composition as in the percentage of total body fat.

In order to know your fitness level, you can simply perform the Health Reviser’s Fitness Test (http://www.healthreviser.com/content/fitness-test) where you basically plug in a USB pulse wave sensor to your computer while attaching the clip to your finger. You can then follow the instructions displayed on the screen which will require you to do some exercises.  For example, to measure your cardiovascular endurance, you will be asked to make jumping jacks or to measure your muscular strength, you will be asked to make pushups. At the end of the session, the program will compare your results with other data to give you a detailed report about your fitness level!

So easy, right?

Now that you are aware of your body’s ability, it is up to you to set your goals!

Some tips on improving your fitness level would be to get regular on your training frequency, do a variety of workouts and progressively increase the intensity or length of your workouts.

One last piece of advice would be ‘Go hard or go home!’ – improving does not come easy and you will have to really work for it, even making your workout more challenging!

However, do not give up! Whenever you feel like quitting, think about why you started! You may stumble, but you can get up! Missed yesterday’s workout? Today is another day! So always get back on track and move closer to your goals! Remember, you can do it!

Image from: http://www.inspirationde.com/image/22568/

Information source: http://www.everydayhealth.com/fitness/measuring-personal-fitness-level.aspx