Can You Go?: Assessments and Program Design for the Active Athlete and Everybody Else

by Dan John

Blood tests, blood pressure and other simple tests might highlight some long-term issues.

simple things like cavities in the teeth, we’re well on our way to addressing problems.

Always measure height. It’s an amazing number for assessing performance at the minimum levels; we’ll talk more about this later.

“Keeping your waist circumference to less than half your height can help increase life expectancy for every person in the world,” according to Margaret Ashwell, an independent consultant and former science director of the British Nutrition Foundation. Brad Pilon, of Eat Stop Eat fame, discusses this issue at length in his digital book, Dieting for Muscle Growth. He takes this a step further and notes that if your waist is over the one-half measure of your height, you might be suffering from a variety of inflammation issues.

“Abdominal fat affects organs like the heart, liver and kidneys more adversely than fat around the hips and bottom, in terms of cardiometabolic risk.”

a client’s waist-to-height ratio is greater than 1 to 2, the person is a body composition client, regardless of whether the client is male or female.

Problems in either of the two measurements indicate a pure body-comp client—this

Assessment Three: Three Questions Question One: How many pillows does it take for you to be comfortable at night?

Any more than one, we know the client has joint mobility issues.

So which joint is the issue? I don’t know. But I do know this: As we address movement, we’ll probably also be addressing body composition, because joint issues impair a proper sleep cycle.

Sleep, along with proper dental care, seems to be a missing part of the whole fat-loss formula.

Robb Wolf taught me that all those lights, from LEDs to television screens to street lamps, are interrupting our sleep cycles. Even if you can’t sleep twelve hours, darken your bedroom as best you can when you sleep.

if a client needs more than one pillow, this is a joint mobility client, a One on the Venn diagram. It will be

so many who start with joint mobility will overlap into body comp, making them Twos, or likely, Sevens.

some sleep issues improve with body-comp changes, and

Do you eat colorful vegetables?

chomping on red peppers is not the same as chomping on corn chips.

If a client answers, “Hell, no,” at least you know where you stand. Most of us agree that vegetables are a key to health, but this client is going to need to be convinced to join the colorful side.

you exercise for at least half an hour each day?

Socratic Dialogue Avenue—What do you mean by exercise?—and

“Make yourself a slave to good habits.”

vegetable and exercise questions allow us some insights that we’ll discuss later when assessing what kind of client we have before us—untrained, detrained,

daze and confused, overconditioned and untrained, or someone seeking mastery.

Four ...

One: Plank

Stu McGill,

Ca...

Can the client do a two-minute plank? If

the client is training the core poorly or is obese.

takes a few attempts to mentally prepare a person for a two-minute challenge.

pushup-position plank (PUPP),

What failure tells you is this: The client is not strong enough.

I look over at Section Five and see the client is a candidate for getting stronger—and please note, rarely is someone a pure Five.

Many women are Fours; they can’t hold the plank, and they have body-comp issues. Strength training, as many have discovered, is a superior way to achieve the lean body many women today aspire to have. The Cult of Cardio is slowly disappearing, and we find more and more women discovering the value of strength training.

Test Two: To the Floor and Back Up

Araújo said: “If a middle-aged or older man or woman can sit and rise from the floor using just one hand—or even better without the help of a hand—they are not only in the higher quartile of musculo-skeletal fitness, but their survival prognosis is probably better than that of those unable to do so.” Each of the two basic movements is assessed—to the ground, and then back to standing—and scored up to five, making a composite score of ten, with one point subtracted per support used, such as a hand or knee. Here’s the interesting part: Those who scored three points or fewer had a five to six times higher risk of death than those scoring more than eight points. A score below eight was linked with two to fivefold higher death rates over the 6.3-year study period.

maintaining high levels of body flexibility, muscle strength, power-to-body weight ratio and coordination are not only good for performing daily activities, but have a favorable influence on life expectancy.”

it’s useful in providing a direction for programming. Improving this test may or may not be good for keeping the Angel of Death from the door, but it certainly brings more competence and safety to one’s daily life.

little teaching drill that masquerades as a cardiovascular workout for some and a mobility workout for others.

“Get Back Ups” or GBUps.

It’s a fine warmup, but it also seems to improve movement. As the movements are restricted when we put a hand on a knee, people need to come up with new strategies to get down and back up.

Doing these series, whether all of them or just some of them, improves the score on the Araújo test. Elderly clients seem to learn to simplify the movements and cut out the extra steps up and down. The feet become planted, and there’s a drive upward with the whole leg and glutes. We’re cheating the test, certainly, but there’s great value in increasing the amount of time that clients spend standing up from and sitting down on the floor. A final tip here: A program that combines swings or squats with a pushup will get your clients successfully on and off the ground.

The third test—and again, this is optional for many clients—is the classic standing long jump. The goal is simple: The client must jump over body height. Not vertically… Horizontally! This is the standing

Jumping less than height is an issue. Is it a lack of power or a lack of mobility?

“You know,” he explained, “people lose the spring in their legs when they get older; I’ve seen old people who literally cannot jump up on a curb.”

loss of explosive movement, a “spring,” is one of the markers of old age.

maintain and then build

upon current levels of overall explosion with ou...

The ability...

appearance of the glutes; again, the butt is the key to a youthful appearance and the secret to youthful power. For the elite athlete, we expect more than body height. If everyone in a specific sport does standing long jumps (SLJs) over nine feet, that’s the target for an elite athlete in that sport. A coach could say, “Somewhere between six feet and nine feet is your problem right now,” and insist on more power, strength and mobility training. If training increases the SLJ, things are going well. If training decreases the long jump, I think you have a problem. The SLJ measures explosive power and overall joint health. Keep an eye on decreases in jumping and address them quickly. Retest the height-to-waist measurement and reassess bodyweight if the SLJ numbers drop. Test Four: Farmer Walk The fourth and final test changed my career: the farmer walk. It was the missing ingredient of my training, and once I added it I be...