Students, College employees and members of the general public can now receive hour-long physical fitness assessments from personal trainers at the Fitness Center, according to Fitness Center director Hugh Mellert. The program provides $50 assessments designed to provide insight into personal fitness levels and to guide clients in designing their own fitness routines, Mellert said.
During each assessment, a personal trainer will evaluate the client's endurance, flexibility and strength, according to Judy McKeown, the program's primary personal consultant. The consultant can then suggest classes or exercises that target specific areas for improvement, McKeown said.
"We give people an idea on how to work on the weaker areas we've discovered, and a few months down the road people come back and say, Wow, that really helped,'" McKeown said. "It's given them a baseline to start from."
The new program is run by McKeown and Thom Walsh, a graduate student at the College. While McKeown performs the actual assessment, Walsh interprets the data and provides advice and resources via e-mail to improve fitness levels, McKeown said.
The fitness assessment program is particularly suited for students who are interested in taking greater advantage of the resources offered by the Fitness Center, according to McKeown.
"Part of our goal is to reach people who aren't already always at the gym and are curious about what their basic fitness level is," McKeown said. "This is a way to give those people a start."
Fitness Center employees also hope the assessment program will increase involvement in other Fitness Center classes, Mellert said. The Fitness and Lifestyle Improvement Program currently includes 66 FLIP classes, the most popular of which are yoga, spinning and strength training, Mellert said. The Fitness Center also offers lectures on how to build an effective workout routine, he said.
Instead of looking at specific measurements like body-fat percentage, the fitness assessment targets overall health and fitness, McKeown said.
Upon beginning the assessment, the trainer asks the client to run or walk a mile on an incline to evaluate endurance, McKeown said. The second part of the assessment requires the client to perform a variety of exercises to evaluate flexibility, she said.
"[Flexibility] is a big deal these days, with life on the computer," McKeown said.
The final portion of the evaluation tests upper and lower-body strength with several strength-training exercises, according to McKeown. These exercises target motion used in daily activities, such as pushing or pulling a heavy object, she said.
The program can be an important tool for educating gym users, according to McKeown.
"People who have been involved in this program have really enjoyed it and are learning new things," McKeown said. "For example, some women these days who thought strength training is a guy thing are learning that it's very important."
The Fitness Center began the program in response to a demand for a simple but effective assessment program to help guide people in their personal fitness routines, Mellert said.
Walsh and McKeown operated a similar program at River Valley Health and Fitness Club, where such fitness assessments are mandatory for all new club members, according to McKeown. Walsh then reworked the pre-existing program and introduced it to Dartmouth's Fitness Center at the beginning of last year, she said.
"This program could be very beneficial because, while a lot of Dartmouth students do use the gym on a regular basis, many of them do not know what their body needs," said Danny Lee '12. "This will probably provide people with a better outlook on how they can keep themselves optimally healthy so that they have a balanced body instead of just having great cardio or great upper-body strength."
Although students who are already active at the Fitness Center will probably take advantage of the fitness assessments, it is unlikely that this program alone will change the habits of students who do not usually frequent the gym, Lee said.
