After completing your health and fitness program, you may choose to work directly with clients towards their fitness goals. Each client is unique and will have individual needs, but what is likely to be constant is the fact that they will require assessments to help them reach those goals.
When you begin working with a new client, assessments are your way to get to know them. Whether you’re working as a personal trainer, fitness instructor or in another role, you can use postural and fitness assessments to understand clients’ strengths, areas for improvement, limitations and skill levels. These factors can relate to mobility and range of motion, body composition, cardiovascular fitness, muscle function, mentality or physical abilities.
Read on for more about why assessments matter for a career in health and fitness.
Assessments Allow You to Gather Baseline Data After Fitness and Health School
Assessments provide valuable data for developing goals and for creating programs to meet those goals. When you are working as an expert in the field, you will have clients who don’t possess the same background knowledge as you do. Because of this, they won’t necessarily be able to self-evaluate. This is where assessments come in handy.
Passive postural assessments give you an idea of a client’s skeletal structure, possible areas of weakness or tightness, asymmetries and imbalances and potential areas for improvement. Additional active assessments will enable you to gather information about your client’s current fitness level, including their range of motion and muscle function. The overhead squat is an example of an assessment that evaluates both strength and mobility in order to gather baseline data.
Demonstrate Your Value Using Assessments After Fitness Consultant Courses
Assessments allow you to demonstrate your value to your clients. Fitness and health school is an investment in your professional success, and you will want to show it off to your advantage. Your specialized knowledge in using assessments shows that you are an expert in your field and that you can use your skills to help others.
Assessments will also demonstrate results, as you’ll be able to show clients markers of their progress. For example, if a client is interested in improving their cardiovascular health, you may record their resting heart rate over time, showing them when they’ve successfully lowered their BPM.  This is both encouraging for clients on their fitness journeys and is an effective business strategy for retaining customers.
Safety and Effective Programming Require Assessments
If you choose to follow a career path where you are designing and delivering fitness programs for clients, both safety and effective programming need to be prioritized. Not only do clients need to be assessed, but you need to also assess and reassess your plan for them. For example, if you have programmed a weight loss strategy for your client but find that there is no weight loss after a reasonable amount of time, you can use your assessment data as a cue to redesign the program.
Keeping clients safe and protecting their well-being is likely already a concern to you if you’re in fitness consultant courses and want a career helping people get healthy. A great way to ensure client safety is through assessments, in particular initial assessments. If you notice limitations, you can cater to those needs and prevent injury or strain to your client’s body. This keeps them happy and healthy and allows them to continue training and working towards their goals with their favourite fitness professional by their side.
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