It’s Time to Take Inventory
The New Year is here. For many businesses, it’s time to take inventory. Companies have to know what products and assets they have in order to plan for the upcoming year. If you’ve started or will begin a health improvement program, it’s a good time to take inventory on yourself. You have to know where you begin to track progress. Here are a few areas to consider, depending on your health improvement goals:
Body Mass
Weight is obvious. It’s also important to take some measurements such as waist, hips, chest, neck, arms, thighs, and calves. Tracking inches lost or gained allows you to know where you’re losing fat or gaining muscle. Not sure what you should weigh? Check out the body mass index chart on the Health Info page.
Fitness
There are at least three areas of fitness you can test for yourself or working with a trainer: cardiovascular fitness, strength, and flexibility. There are both simple and complicated tests for each that goes beyond the scope of this memo. The type of testing depends on the priority of each element in your health improvement program. I want to add some muscle mass, so I’m going to test for strength in my arms, shoulders, chest, and legs now and periodically throughout the year.
Medical Metrics
Resting heart rate and blood pressure are easy to test. If you’re working on pre-diabetes or cholesterol levels, you’ll have to get those tested by the pros. However, if you’ve made these a priority, you probably already know where you began at your last physical.
Finally, if you haven’t had a physical to check the medical metrics, get it scheduled. You can still begin your health improvement program without a specific goal in medical metrics, but do it ASAP. If you don’t know where you’re beginning, you have no idea where you’re supposed to go.
What are you prepared to do today?
