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What are your favorite ways to measure your own health?
A lot of people are familiar with body fat percentage, BMI, etc. Personally, my BMI has been 'better' when I've been less healthy, and generally worse as I've been more healthy. Body fat percentage is difficult to actually measure. So every few months, I look for metrics that fit my biases. For example:
- Jeff Nippard's Noob to Freak Benchmarks - I like these primarily because it's a multiplier on bodyweight. Additionally, he makes a good argument for why you'll never get past "Intermediate" due to the work and sacrifices required.
- StrengthLevel - If you want to compare yourself to people of similar weight, age, and gender. You can see the "novice", "intermediate", etc. break downs of your lift for your cohort.
- Ready for Labour and Defence was a USSR and now modern Russia series of benchmarks of health. It includes pull-up goals as well as how far you can throw a grenade. Can't say I've applied these but I like the concept.
- Anime Workout - Solo-Levelling, One-Punch Man. Why wouldn't you want to be an anime hero?
If possible, explain why it's your "favorite." Can be everything from accuracy, to ease of application, or you just being really good at it.
For me:
- Squat, Deadlift, and Bench - 1x Bodyweight x 10 reps (e.g., a barbell squat where you're lifting your body weight) - I like the idea that I can truly support my own weight.
- Being able to do unassisted pullups
- 100 push ups, 100 pull ups, 100 squats - it's completely arbitrary, based on a base 10 number system, but for that same reason it just feels like a good "benchmark."
- Your 30 minute run distance / speed - 30 minutes is relatively long, so I like it as a measure of realistic improvement, rather than thinking about outlier improvements in speed or distance that might go away the next week.
- Enough hours of sleep and a normal sleep schedule for 1 month - This is hard for me, but feels great when I'm in the swing of it.
- Doing some kind of activity every day for at least 1 month - Even if it's just 15 minutes of stretching, I know that it means something to "try."
I like the completely subjective question “how do I feel today?”
I think you might be conflating health with fitness. Fitness can be considered part of health, but it’s certainly not all of it; theres a lot more to even just the physical portion of health.
The subjective question I ask myself is actually a pretty good way to think about health because it’s a good measurement of how well I have been taking care of myself overall. If I’m not taking care of myself - if I am eating crappy food, if I am not sleeping enough, if I am not taking my medications on time, if I take a day of not doing anything - I am going to start to feel crappy by the next day.
I don’t think this works for everyone though. A few years ago I wouldn’t have realized there is a difference because I didn’t do all the healthy lifestyle things so I would not have had a sensible baseline to compare against. But it works for me specifically because I also have a lot of mental holdups that make me feel bad emotionally if I don’t do these things, because failing those things is counter to my goals.
My smart watch has an achievement for getting 4 hours of workouts in, in a month.
It feels like a low target, so I try to make sure I meet it every month at the very least. 4x 1hr workouts, or 8x 30min workouts add a lot to your life without taking much.
Tack on getting my 10k steps, and I feel like for a middle-age dude, I'm doing alright.
Damn, that Jeff Nippard blog post is in bad shape. So many typos, repeated paragraphs, etc.