Firefighter Training

Woo ha! I feel so energized at 7:30am!! Okay...not really. I got up today at 5:45am, because I had to go down to the Firefighter Institute in Champaign to conduct simple fitness assessment on the firefighters there. We assess their fitness now and after their 6-week training program and basically see how well they've improved.


This was for my research lab by the way. Not that I've ever mentioned it really in my previous posts yet, but I'm in a research lab called the Exercise Psychophysiology Lab (ExPPL). Primarily, our focus is the effects of exercise on more cognitive and psychological factors. This fitness assessment, however, just evaluates the consequences of exercise on physical health. It doesn't seem to correlate well with our lab's focus and it seems obvious that "DUH! If you exercise, you'll get stronger and improve your physical fitness and body composition," but the lab has been conducting this research for a long, long time now before the benefits of exercise were so well-known. We continue the research just as something cool.


Anyways, the new firefighters took part in the following assessments: weight, bench press test, sit-and-reach flexibility test, waist-to-hip ratio, and skinfold tests (which measures subcutaneous, outermost, layer of fat at specific spots on the body).


I WAS IN CHARGE OF THE WAIST-TO-HIP RATIO!! It's not the most exciting job, but I was still really happy that they actually made me responsible for one of the tests instead of just having me observe or whatever. It's a pretty simple task, but it was still really fun and I wasn't nervous. When the three groups walked in, I would announce that I'll be taking their waist-to-hip ratios, waist being the smallest part of the torso usually around the belly button area and hip being where the hip bone is, and in order to get an accurate measurement, the guys and girl would need to roll up their sweatshirts a bit. After the announcement, they would step up one-by-one and I'll do my thing.


Since this test is relatively fast compared to the others, I had free time so I measured my own circumferences. My waist is 28 inches and my hip is 29 inches. My head is 21 inches. And I couldn't measure my chest by myself...and it was awkward to ask someone else to help me. I also did sit-and-reach. I was surprised... I got a sit-and-reach score of 10 inches. I'm positive that is more than I was in grade school. YAY!! I want to try their bench test too. Both guys and girls had to complete bench presses matching a certain rhythm set by a  metronome. There was 0% incline on the benches, the guys used 85 lbs, and the girl used 35 lbs. There isn't a standard for how well either sex is supposed to do since this is only measuring improvement or decline in fitness, but the highest # of reps a guy was able to do to the rhythm was 70 reps and the girl did 20 reps. Really impressive on both parts.