Weight Management Indices Assessment - How Can it Benefit Me?

When completing an initial assessment before commencing clinical exercise sessions, there are a range of measures that can be taken to help assess the patient's health and fitness, set goals and track progress of the prescribed exercise program. Some of these measures are completed with every patient, while others are specific to the individual's needs. A Physiotherapist or Exercise Physiologist is best suited to complete this assessment as they have sufficient knowledge and training to be able to perform it as well as clinically analyse your results before you start exercise.

Part of our full body assessments here at Health Point Physiotherapy include weight management indices - for example weight, height, waist circumference, body fat, body water and other measurements can be taken, and from these body mass index (BMI), abdominal volume index (AVI), conicity index (CI), waist to height (WHtR) and waist to hip (WHR) ratios and other parameters can be calculated. These are quick, simple and non-invasive ways for us to assess your body composition.

Assessing body mass and composition can be helpful in so many ways and has been widely studied to ensure the correct measures are being assessed. For example, increased BMI in women and WHtR in men have been associated with the presence of hypertension (high blood pressure) and WHR is a great indicator to assess risk of obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS). WHtR has also been highlighted as the best discriminator for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidaemia in both sexes; all factors considered in the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The reason that we have a few different weight management indices, is because more often than not weight alone can't tell us the full story. This is why we may instruct you not to get too hung up on the number on the scales - particularly on a day-to-day basis!

Weight can be a great place to start, particularly also using your height to calculate your BMI to ensure you are in a healthy weight range to begin. However, waist and hip measurements are also really helpful as an easy way to assess body composition. Lean mass and body fat assessments can further help to assess body composition.

Aside from assessing a patient's risk of future complications of health conditions, weight management indices are a really useful way to track the effectiveness of your exercise prescription. Combined with a healthy diet, we should see an improvement in body composition over time which not only increases your confidence and improves your body shape, but also enables your body to function better for you in everyday life!

So next time you are in the clinic for your reassessment, try not to be nervous when we take your weight and waist measurements and other parameters - they are useful tools that will set you up for your clinical exercise sessions moving forward. They also help us identify any potential risks of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular diseases and some other health conditions.

References:

American College of Sports Medicine (Ed.). (2013). ACSM's health-related physical fitness assessment manual. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Martinez‐Rivera, C., Abad, J., Fiz, J. A., Rios, J., & Morera, J. (2008). Usefulness of truncal obesity indices as predictive factors for obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. Obesity, 16(1), 113-118.

Lee, C. M. Y., Huxley, R. R., Wildman, R. P., & Woodward, M. (2008). Indices of abdominal obesity are better discriminators of cardiovascular risk factors than BMI: a meta-analysis. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 61(7), 646-653.

Zhou, Z., Hu, D., & Chen, J. (2009). Association between obesity indices and blood pressure or hypertension: which index is the best?. Public health nutrition, 12(8), 1061-1071.