What’s the point of the Self Assessment and Why Should you Get your Players to do it?

How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? This is exactly  our sentiment when it comes to the WLC’s Self Assessment. You can’t know how far you’ve progressed when the six weeks are over unless you assessed where you started. 

Group leaders: This is the point you really want to communicate to your players as to why they should complete the Self Assessment. 

To understand a little more of the “why” behind the Self Assessment, let’s look at the options:

• The Health Measurement is a body measurement as a simple proxy for your overall health. One of the best simple predictors of risk of cardiovascular disease is your waist-to-hips ratio.

  • For men: Low risk is .95 or lower (this means that your waist measurement is 95% of your hips measurement or less), moderate risk is .96-1.0, and high risk is greater than 1.0.

  • For women: Low risk is .8 or lower, moderate risk is .81 to .85, and high risk is greater than .85. Generally speaking, women's hips are larger compared to their waist circumference than men's

  • For a simple measurement that members can track over time, you can use weight. While it's not the perfect proxy for health, when an individual knows they need to lose weight, it's a good directional measurement.

  • For a more in-depth view, you can use body composition, or body fat percentage. The value in a measurement like this is that while a person improves their health through exercise, their weight might not change as dramatically as they'd like it to. This could be a results of increasing muscle mass, which weighs more than fat, as they decrease fat mass. A body composition test can detect this.

• The Fitness Measurement can help players see how their energy is increasing and if their metabolism is improving. As you improve your strength and/or conditioning, your body begins to change how the "machinery" of metabolism works. You will begin to process food as energy more efficiently. 

Your choice of measurement is important because players may not lose pounds during the Challenge, but if they commit to the nutrition component, they are almost certain to lose inches or change their body composition.