Advanced Fitness Assessment and Exercise Prescription, 6th Edition
media review written by Ted Scheck

I work out as often as my lower-back and schedule allow. On February 1st, the skies above Indiana, in their infinitely chaotic wisdom, decided to deliver a peculiar mixture of moisture that was partially-frozen sleet in one level of the atmosphere, and where it struck the ground - ice. This stuff fell and fell and fell until about a 3-inch coating pretty much put central Indiana in a total gridlock.

My school district, and dozens of others, lost four days of instruction, all of us ice-locked and homebound. Many lost power. Four days later I set to the huge and arduous task of prying up large heavy chunks of ice with a garden spade, thinking I'd get this done and then go work out at Cardinal Fitness.

I didn't get to go to Cardinal Fitness and lift my upper-body into a sweaty tizzy and then bike 10 virtual reality-induced miles. The ice became the workout, and brothers and sisters, what a workout it ended up being. Prying up ice is brutally hard work. It takes much energy. I was soon sweaty and breathing hard, warm in the cold, attaining a rare kind of balance between the exertions of my own arms, legs, and core against the rapidly-falling temperature that would eventually plunge from the mid-20s down to 6°. I fell into a rhythm, where I would squat down, bend my back, use my hips, and deliver long, smooth parallel strokes, breaking the ice's grasp of my driveway. Soon my hands and wrists ached from the thudding impacts of the blade performing hari-kari on solid ice. I did not have anyone outside with me to help me, although my 7th-grade son helped me shovel the ice floe chunks to the side, for which I was grateful.

I was not hooked up to a VO2 machine, trapping my expired air for later analysis. No one recorded my heart by radio telemetry or with a monitor, though I felt my heart hammering in my ears and could hear the blow of blood whooshing through my temples. I was getting five workouts at the same time, coincidentally, the very same five things that are this book's chief focus. They are:

1. Cardiorespiratory endurance
2. Muscular fitness
3. Body weight and composition
4. Flexibility
5. Balance
6. Bone strength is also included

I got such great cardio I had to take a breather, which was shoveling 3-inch thick jagged chunks of Titanic-breaching ice into my neighbor lady's lawn. This turned into cardio and muscular fitness, much of it core body work, especially around my middle and the part of me that sits on chairs, for the power and force of what we do emanates from our behind and core. Thirty minutes of this turned into negative body weight and composition (gains in muscle mass, no noticeable reduction in the fatty deposits I wear above my belt). Flexibility was definitely an issue, as this effort caused my body to move in all sorts of uncomfortable bending, twisting, and stretching ways. For 47, I’m reasonably flexible, but could always use a little more. Balance was not an issue, in that I never lost it falling, but the whole workout really was a balance test that I passed because I stopped the workout before serious fatigue set in, endangering me as I stood on slippery ice.

With its multidisciplinary approach, the book emphasizes laboratory techniques for assessment. The text is organized around components of physical fitness, giving a chapter to each one, and then following up with a chapter on exercise prescription.

A book can and should be judged not by its cover, but by the foundations laid in the preface and Chapter 1. The preface is the hand holding the seed, poised to set it deep in fertile Midwestern soil. You can look at the entire tree just by peeking at the preface, and see if this is the kind of tree you'd like to climb or build a tree house in. The author has been working on this tree since 1984, editing it six times. Edition 6 can also be accessed online, spreading the canopy of the tree's branches to ever widening lengths.

Chapter One lays the groundwork for a nation desperately in need of a 180° turnaround, as an alarming 24% of adults profess to no physical activity during leisure time, even though regular physical activity (like shoveling ice) plays an important role in the prevention of chronic diseases. This is rather an alarming way to begin a book, but sound the alarm, folks! We as fitness practitioners need to bang the pots and pans at midnight and wake this nation up. People need to get off whatever it is they're reclining on and get out and move, as 60% of the world does not meet the minimum requirement of 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity.

Statistics and useful (albeit alarming) information jump out at you and poke you in the gut, so troubling they are. Inactivity leads to chronic disease. CV (cardiovascular) diseases are responsible for 36% of all deaths in the US and 50% in Europeans. The flood-tide of obesity rates continue to climb: 2/3 of adults and 1/3 of children are overweight or obese. The book is filled with bright, easy-to-read graphs and illustrations, and in the rear of the chapters, Key Points and Key Terms. Used as a college textbook by numerous colleges and universities, Review Questions will require you to correctly answer them before moving on.

For those tasked with Fitness Screening, you'll absolutely love Chapter 2. I learned much from this chapter, chiefly, I don't want to go to the doctor because inactivity has caused my own health to decline. For a 'non-clinical' point of view, there is more detail on health screening and risk classification than you'll probably ever need.

Chapter 3 got me thinking, or questioning whether there are two classifications to physical fitness, or one, or many. It depends upon the cognitive inclination of the author, and the fact that we've come a long way since I graduated from college in 1985, when "fitness" was defined by the current research. Performance-based fitness, (Bouchard, 2007, from Physical Activity and Health, Human Kinetics) deals with an individual's ability in athletic competition, depending heavily upon motor skills, cardiorespiratory power and capacity, muscular strength, speed, power or endurance, body composition, motivation, and nutritional status. Health-related fitness, according to Bouchard, are as follows:

Heyward uses Cardiorespiratory endurance, Muscular fitness, Body weight and composition, Flexibility, and Balance as the focal points of her book, and you can look at the table above and see where those five fit across the health-related fitness spectrum.

The focus is, again, on the author's take on how the global term "fitness" is defined, what context it is defined in, and what particular things they've been doing in their careers. Looking back into Physical Activity and Health, I just realized that this book gives the clinical detail that Heyward's Advanced Fitness Testing and Exercise Prescription does not. I have both texts, and am glad to have two such experts describing both sides of the same coin. Chapter 3 goes into great detail the principles of assessment, prescription, and exercise program adherence.

One thing I found utterly engrossing and fascinating was the table, on p. 60: "Comparison of Professional Certifications." Seven different organizations containing fifteen different certifications, with five columns describing Certification, Education, Field, Experience, and Scope of Practice. I’ve been shopping these organizations around because I would like to be certified in the field that I've been fascinated with and have loved since I began seriously training with weights.

Now we get into the branches that grow every-which-way, the first two being Chapter 4, Assessing Cardiorespiratory Fitness, and Chapter 5, Designing Cardio exercise programs. Twenty-seven years of data and updates on that data and careful observation of the trends in the field of physical fitness. Chapter 6 and 7: Assessing Muscular Fitness and following that, Designing Resistance Training Programs. Chapter 8: Assessing Body Composition, and 9: Designing Weight Management and Body Composition Programs. Exhaustive in detail and scope, and for a 'non-clinical' book the depth and breadth the author et al goes into will either answer your most specific question, or point you to where it is located. Chapter 10: Flexibility, and a program for something I'll definitely read more carefully: Low Back Care.

Chapter 12, Assessing Balance and Designing Balance Programs points to the trend of balance chiefly being a health-related test, now gaining momentum as a key component in functional fitness. Following the trends of Pilates, the enormous popularity of stability ball exercise programs, and special exercise programs for our ageing population, balance is given its own chapter. I thoroughly enjoyed this particular chapter, because I absolutely love doing balance activities, and under supervision, getting kids to fall on mats to learn how to fall. Not all elementary-aged children know specifically what to and not to do when they fall, and the trials and errors of little-kid-dom can produce sprains, strains, and even broken bones. I teach the importance of good posture, the difference between static and dynamic balance, and in my older students, the vestibular system.

The appendices, beginning on p. 315, cover Health and Fitness Appraisals, from the Physical Activity Readiness-Questionnaire (PAR) & You, a Medical History Questionnaire, Checklist of Signs and Symptoms of Disease, the PARmed-X, Lifestyle Evaluation, and Informed Consent. Rounding out the chapter is a long list of 27 Selected Professional Organizations and Institutes, from the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA, www.afaa.com) to Sports Medicine New Zealand (www.sportsmedicine.co.nz).

Appendix B is a Summary of Graded Exercise Test and Cardio Test Protocols. Extremely useful for the P.E./Wellness Teachers will be Appendix C, Muscular Fitness Exercises and Norms. Body Composition is covered in D, and E is long on detail concerning Energy Intake and Expenditure. Flexibility and Low Back Care Exercises finish Appendix F with many photographs to help the non-clinical practitioners. The glossary is 10 pages long and thorough.

For the P.E. and Wellness Instructor and a detailed resource to help them narrow the focus of their fitness testing, to the licensed Physical Trainers helping adults to begin to sow good healthy seeds, Advanced Fitness Assessment and Exercise Prescription will definitely need its own space on your bookshelf.

Ted Scheck graduated from St. Ambrose College, located in Davenport, Iowa, in 1985 with a BA in Physical Education, and from 1985-89 he taught three years at Davenport Schools. He moved to Indianapolis with his wife, Pam, in 1989 and taught his first year at Indianapolis Public Schools. From 1990-2002 Ted worked as Director of Motion Analysis Laboratory at Riley Hospital for Children. When the funding ran out for that job he got back into teaching, and has been at various schools in IPS since 2003. Sidener Academy for High Ability Students opened in 2008 and Ted was chosen as the PE/Wellness teacher. Teaching has been a long, and extremely interesting road for him, and at the midpoint of his career he feels that the next 12 or 13 years should be the best of his career. He's looking forward to it!