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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.
Indeed yeah, I was actually looking for more fitness-oriented measurements. The fitness weekly thread is posted in ~health, though, so here we are. But if people enjoy the topic, I don't mind it being not exactly what I intended.
I do agree that fitness is more than just lifting more and heavy though. I didn't expand on it in the OP much, but sleep is basically a cornerstone for my mental health and generally how I feel going through life. Less sleep, my thoughts start to need trigger warnings, and it took me years to realize my brain was just playing tricks on me and I needed to sleep. I've always had problems sleeping since I was a kid, so it should seem "obvious," but it never was until I had a rigorous schedule to follow. My relationship to stress, caffeine, etc. was greatly improved after. I think tracking "lacking" sleep is the general way people think about their sleep though (e.g. Oura, EightSleep, Withings sleep pad, whatever else).
My biggest obstacles in life are anxiety, procrastination and a sense that it would be quite restful to not exist (dw, I'm not suicidal), so with that said I have come to find a few thermometers that help me measure how I'm doing and how kind I need to be to myself.
First and most basic thermometer is if, when and how I managed to make my bed today. The later in the day the rougher I'm having it. The less friction (or active decision making) the better I'm doing. Some days it's enough to notice my bed is not done to realise I'm having one of those days and I can completely change my plans and sense for the day.
The rest of the thermometers are not ranked and are a bit more fuzzy, I'll tell you about a couple if them so you get a feeling for how you could use something similar.
Did I pay my bills on time and how easy was it. I pay my bills around the 27th of every month, except a few debit card based recurring subscriptions that are automatic. I have setup a few other automatic payments like the union and unemployment insurance but I need to pay the most important ones manually to notice where my money goes and to know how well I'm doing.
While the bed thing takes care of daily form the bills thing takes care of longer time form (this is the one that sets of the "depression and how deep it is"-alarm bells!
Wrt to physical health I know I'm doing good when I get back on the horse in just a few days after falling off! I don't get any gratification from doing my morning routine, my back strengthening exercises, my full body workouts or my "daily" cardio (although I suspect that if I ever manage to go really hard on cardio I might get that dopamine hit I hear so much about) so it's quite hard to keep doing it. I fall off often, so getting back on it quickly is a good way for me to notice I'm doing well.
Other than these kinds of thermometers I don't have any measurements I like, the rest are just numbers that don't represent any meaningful things compared to the status of my bed :)
On "survival of the fittest" and language
In my primary language (swedish) the phrase "survival of the fittest" has been translated to "survival of the strongest".
I have always thought that this mistranslation has affected how we see biology, evolution and fitness.
This post reminds me of this but I also wonder if I've been wrong about my assumption and that people with English as their primary language also has seen fitness (how well your capabilities fit your circumstances) as strength, savagery and dominance or of this is a shift that has occurred?
(I'm obviously excluding evolutionary biologists, regardless of their primary language, from this as understanding this is the basis of their field.)
Although I studied (not evolutionary) biology, I think 'fittest' can easily be misunderstood by the average non-biologist native English speaker. The everyday use of 'fittest' does generally assume (physical) fitness. Also, I have vague recollections that during intro-level biology classes, the 'real' meaning for evolution had to be drilled into students to prevent the misconception.
I speak no Swedish, but for the back-translation 'strongest', I can see how it carries borh a similar enough meaning and similar misunderstanding, as the English fittest. In that the typical meaning recalls (physical) strength, musculature, etc., or mental fortitude. But, strong also has the meaning of being relatively better at something (eg, she has strong language skills), which hits closer to the evolutionary meaning. - Out of curiosity, is this latter meaning of 'strong' used in Swedish?
That's interesting, thank you! How weird it is to finally take the time to ask about a detail I've pondered for over 30yrs and get an answer by one qualified respondent!
No, not really, it would be understood from context and maybe younger people (who are way more lax with their anglicisations) wouldn't notice, but in my generation I'd say no. There is a similar way to use "stark" (swedish for "strong", in many contexts) but only for emotional stuff like "that was a 'strong' play".
Ahh, ok, in that context of the Swedish weird for strong, I can definitely see the added opacity. Good translation is tricky. ty for sharing!
If it helps, I did study evolutionary biology, and "fittest" isn't really the way we describe what's happening at higher levels.
Linguistically, the missing piece is that the word fittest is being used in a plural sense, as in "the group among us who is most fit" and not "the singular individual who is fitter than the rest." Like lackofaname implied, this is more of a simplification for high school or intro college biology. A better way to phrase it is "survival of the fit enough".
So the actual language is trying to imply that the "strongest", "smartest", or "most resilient" (fittest) survive long enough to reproduce, but really you don't have to be any of those things to pass on your genes and contribute to the direction of your species evolution- you just have to survive long enough to make a baby, who survives long enough to make a baby, who survives long enough... etc etc etc.
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.
For context, my motivations for getting stronger are to keep up with my quickly growing kids, be able to comfortably handle all tasks around the home, and to look better than a pot-bellied skeleton for my wife.
I agree with Akir with using "how do I feel today?" as a core question. I find this useful in two ways. First is that you can start to correlate different lifestyle and diet choices with their effects (keeping in mind that feeling certain discomforts - like reasonable DOMS - can be a positive sign). Second is that it can be used to put the day's performance into context, such as being unable to add weight in the gym after a night of poor sleep or unusual stress.
Beyond that, for me, there's no benchmarks or goals or categories to strive for, simply "make numbers go up". Weight on the bar, reps in a set, total volume, distance, speed, lean weight, etc. I track all of my workouts in the Hevy app and my weight in Apple Health. I'd like to track measurements, but I always found it very fiddly to do it myself and so usually don't bother. If I'm going to be bored and uncomfortable for 45-60min x 5 days a week indefinitely, there needs to be objectively measurable progress for my efforts. I don't derive any satisfaction or pride from simply knowing I'm maintaining a consistent habit or putting in meaningful effort, only when it's producing results. External categories/benchmarks/comparisons don't really interest me.
edit:
I forgot to add, for broader health but still fitness related, I occasionally get a routine physical. I probably should get better about doing that annually now that I'm getting older. Once I did one of those screening packages where they test your blood for "everything", but I don't think it was really worth it.
They way clothes fit: Generally speaking, I have used the same size pants for two years now. When I'm eating bad and I'm bloated or gaining body fat my pants fit tighter, when I'm doing good they fit a bit looser. Shirts too, some of my shirts won't stay down if I gain even five pounds.
In terms of gym activity, yes if I'm able to do at least 20 minutes of cardio and am able to up the weight I feel like I'm doing something right. I also do pull ups before my gym session, at my peak I was able to do 10 pull ups easily in one go (and the number would decline after each set). At my worst I couldn't even do three.
One last thing: bowel movements. When I'm not doing as good as I should my bowel movements are more, say, erratic. And the consistency is off. When I'm healthy they follow more of a schedule and are firm and I don't feel like my intestines are leaking.
I've been saying the clothes thing for years. I know so many people that constantly weigh themselves when all they need to do is check which notch of their belt they are using. Also, recent research indicates that body shape is a better predictor of health than body weight.
Two weeks ago Will Tennyson did a video where he gained and lost over ten pounds in just a few days time. I swear the home bathroom scale is designed specifically to make people neurotic. If you are weighing yourself daily to see your weight loss progress you are creating a lot of unnecessary stress that will very likely end up causing you to ruin your diet and eat unhealthy meals.
That reminds me about what I read on home scales years ago, though I can't find it now.
First is that many home scales are garbage, with both incorrect and inconsistent internal readings. Step on repeatedly in one session and you might get a wide range of results. In an effort to paper over the inconsistency, many of these scales have an internal memory of the last displayed result which it will show again as long as the new reading is closeish to the old value. This can lead to some huge jumps in a few days if the initial reading was maybe lower than reality, you gain just enough to trigger a new new measurement, and the new reading may be higher than reality. Sometimes you can force it to give you a new measurement by putting only partial weight on, wait for a reading, and then do your full weight. This doesn't always work though, as some cheap scales remember a couple readings to account for family usage instead of just one.
There are scales that don't do the memory trickery and have better calibration, but you've got to hunt for them.
I think, especially if you’re barely starting to lift weights, body recomposition counts for a lot.
Hm. I think I don’t like measuring my own health? I do like measuring fitness, which, agreeing with @Akir, feels pretty different to me. Well, I did like measuring fitness? I actually have found that I care less and less about measuring fitness, and more about doing things that I enjoy and feel good. I stopped pacing my runs and started paying less attention to my climbing grades and lifting weights, and overall I feel energized to do all of those things more than when I was intently measuring them.
It feels reassuring to hear that I have a good blood pressure at my annual checkup. Other than that, I don't really think too much about my health unless I don't feel well!
Echoing Akir, there is a difference between measuring fitness and health, and I track both loosly. I went through a period of heavy tracking about 15 years ago. I used to count my macros and calories, meticulously track lift improvements/running times/climb grades. I did the same with health. I was engaged in activites that required intensive, frequent physicals, so I would also get baseline updates from my doctor on everything from heart health to lung capacity. Everything was supposed to be up and to the left! It took a long time, but I realized the way I exercised made me prone to injury. I'd see great gains, get injured, and then be miserable for a few months until I could return to exercise only to rinse and repeat. I'm now pretty lazze faire, and have different indicators for health and fitness.
Fitness is always easier to track.
My main exercises now are swimming, biking, mountain biking, and weight lifting. Like others, I like to get quicker and stronger, but now I listen to my body and only push when it feels good to do so. My progress is slower, but I have much longer periods of gain between injury. And now injuries are usually stupid things like breaking a toe on a coffee table, rather than activity based like tearing a pectoral while climbing. I can also feel the differences during my activities. I don't wear a watch when I swim, but everyone else I swim with does so I have a good idea about how much I'm improving from actual data. However, more important than actual stats is how I'm feeling when I'm moving through the water. Does my body feel smooth? Are my strokes full with good tempo? Most importantly, do I feel like I find my groove? The same can be said for biking as well. When you're tuned in from a combination of practice and presence, everything feels right and you feel that you can do things you couldn't before. That's my number one goal.
Physically, I don't pay much attention to the scale. Weight fluctuates - from water retention, bloating, etc - and fat/muscle both add weight. For me, body composition is much more important. How am I looking? Do I feel broader? Am i seeing definition is funny places like my shins or my forearms? Am I starting to chafe in new areas of my wetsuit. What does my stomach look like when I sit on the toilet. I use those as indicators for how my body is reorganizing itself.
Health is completely different.
For that I usually track things that effect my day to day comfort and operations. How well I'm sleeping? How rested I am when I wake up? What does my stomach feel like? Am I constipated? Are my chronic injuries flaring up? How do my gums feel? How often am I getting sick? How many weird work arounds am I having to do? What does my back feel like? Am I slouchier than usual? Am I consulting GPT a lot about health items? How many specialist visits do I have coming up?
Interestingly, I'm about as fit now as I have ever been. I exercise 2-4 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can lift as much as I could when I was 22. My cardio is just about as good as ever. My body composition is probably the best it's ever been. And with all of that my health is kind of shit. I'm constipated about 6 months of every year - meaning I'm taking a nearly daily laxative, eating about a half pound of kimchi a day, taking a probiotic, and still feeling like garbage when I eat. My old injuries have turned into chronic ones - particularly my Dupuytren's - and they effect everything from biking to walking to the post office to opening jars. The bloodwork I did for stomach issues came back that I have high cholesterol and high glucose levels, even though my diet is nearly all farmers market fare and I exercise all the time. (A good friend who is even fitter than me had blood work come back saying he was pre-diabetic at 145 lbs, 6', and literally as fit as a race horse... what the fuck?). I've been sleeping like shit. While my teeth and gum health are great according to the dentist, my gums start to bleed sometimes out of no where. The list goes on and on.
I'm not sure if it's aging, but this is definitely the first time in my life where overall fitness feels very high, while my health feels like it's pretty low. I'm not really sure what to make of it and outside of he work with doctors, personal routine, and exercise, I don't know what to do.
Anyway, lots of indicators and metrics, for fitness and health. Interestingly, while I understand what to do to effect my fitness, it can be difficult to know what levers will cause outcome changes in my health.
I’ve been very active recently, and my favorite comparison benchmarks are my 5k time and my zone 2 pace. I sadly don’t know my exact zone 2, since I wanted to do a check and we noticed some chronic inflammation (I still haven’t figured that part out) so I’m just using approximations and the “conversational feel”
This is very subjective though since depending on where I live it can be 10-30°C with 50-100% humidity. But I still always go for what feels doable.
Calisthenics makes it so easy to measure progress, specially at the moment that started to learn skills, I can set a skill goal, ex handstand push-up and see where I lack, can I stand my balance? Then I need to practice that, do I have enough strength to push myself up, then I need to find exercises to train shoulders (pike pushups...), combined with progressions for the move, tuck, straddle, etc. It's fairly easy to see your progress and truly know if you get closer to the move.
I also do the same with series, volume, intensity, rest time, right now I have a rest time of 1:30 minutes between series, when I started timing it, it was 3 minutes, there are many ways to measure progress and make the moves harder.
I do not use any tracking apps, at the beginning I only had a square per day, where I mark each workout to create the habit, at some point you just internalize when is right to go (rest days are important) and it feels bad to miss days.
Other than that, my only tracking is a cheap digital watch to chrono the rest and the whole workout time.
The best measure is your body, at then end that's your goal, if your body is sore but not in any pain the next day you did well and should be proud.
Do you use any publicly accessible online resources for your calisthenics "programming" and progressions that you could share here?
I'm doing some very basic stuff atm but that is sufficient for now but I'm always interested in having more information.
At the beginning my knowledge came from YouTube, I basically target people with the body that I want to obtain, and evaluate if what they teach is good advice or not by do it myself, avoid as much as possible long videos, people selling services, or straight up gym bros.
There's also people who publish their full workout without cuts or talking, which shows more clearly how you could train.
Some channels I can recommend:
I did read a big chunk of Overcoming Gravity it's a very dense book, so I can't recommend it to everyone, but it's one of the best sources of knowledge, a bit on the advanced side and leaning into gymnastics, which can be a bit discouraging.
I also wrote a bit here about what I did right at the beginning: https://tildes.net/~health/1nl3/fitness_weekly_discussion#comment-fg7s
This chart will give you most of the progressions, but my way to go is find the skill and google the progressions myself, sometimes I take notes and try to link videos of others doing them (YT shorts are great for this)
Thank you very much, what an excellent and thorough reply <3
I don't really ingest information from videos that well but I guess it's time to get my own copy of Overcoming gravity that everyone talks so much about :)
I will also bookmark (and download) the linked spreadsheet, what a fantastic resource!
I have to mention that videos add a lot of value, sometimes the difference between being able to do a move or not is small changes in posture, for example the type of grip on the bar, palm position, the rotation of your shoulders, protraction of your back, etc.
I was stuck without success trying the handstand push-up until I saw a video of a guy indicating how to do the correct bending of the elbows, and it was suddenly way easier, same happened with the muscle up initial swing.
Many people also recommend recording yourself, I don't like to do it, but it's the best way to correct mistakes.
Even if the book does not improve your calisthenics, it will at least improve your sleep, those topics did wonders to clear my mind from other thoughts before sleeping.
Damn, that Jeff Nippard blog post is in bad shape. So many typos, repeated paragraphs, etc.
The main apps I’ve found amazing daily use for my health tracking and behavior activation: