Where are you specifically with respect to personal health and fitness? Do you know?
More important, perhaps:
Do you know where you are going?
Do you know where you want to be?
One very curious human characteristic is that there are legions of personal health sub-systems that we assume will take care of themselves — and so we ignore them! Furthermore, we also tend to ignore many clues that could tell us if and when we are heading for trouble.
Body temperature is a good example of an internal body control system that we heed. Most of us have a body temperature of 98.6 degrees most of the time. Our bodies will automatically shiver to generate heat when we get too cold, and sweat to dissipate heat when we get too hot. We rely on our internal thermocontrol mechanisms to keep our core temperature at 98.6. Also, we have symptoms when our body temperature leaves the “normal” zone. We can feel it and then we can “fix” it — up or down. We can put clothes on or take them off to help our bodies maintain the correct body temperature.
Blood pressure is a good example of an internal body control system that we ignore. Most young adults have blood pressures at 120/80 or less, and most young adults do not know and do not care what their actual blood pressure is most of the time. However, by the mid-30’s it is important for everyone to have regular checks of blood pressure, because there are no symptoms when blood pressures get out of control for most people. A person’s blood pressure can become dangerously high and that person would have no way to know. You don’t hurt when you have high blood pressure. Most of the time you don’t “feel” anything different. There is no automatic sign or set of symptoms when a person has high blood pressure. High blood pressure is usually discovered when the individual is being examined for some other reason and a blood pressure screen is part of the routine examination.
However, it is very important for a person to know if she/he has high blood pressure for two reasons:
- A motivated person can do something about high blood pressure — many treatments are available to help patients control their blood pressure, and
- Untreated high blood pressure can lead to disasterous medical complications, including strokes and heart attacks, if left untreated.
How do you know if you are “fit”?
What does it mean to be “fit”?
If you go on the web to Google and ask for references to FITNESS, you will get 940,000,000 hits in the first couple of seconds. So there are millions of definitions of FITNESS!!
In the GPS for Health system, we use seven benchmarks as the basis for our GPS definition of cardio-pulmonary fitness.
FIRST, you want to know where you are today. That is Reference Point A.
SECOND, you want to specify where you want to be, your GOAL, and that is Reference Point B.
OK, we know that age and sex are not variables that you can control with tools available at home — but everything else in the table below you can certainly nudge in the right direction, if you really want to do it.
