Our Services - Health Assessment

The blood pressure represents the force exerted by the blood on the arterial walls. The systolic pressure represents the pressure when the heart is beating (during the systole phase of the cardiac cycle) and the diastolic pressure when the heart is filling between blasts (during the diastole phase). Nearly one in four adults in the UK has high blood pressure. If you know you have high blood pressure you are lucky as you can do something about it, however about a third of people don’t know about their condition. We will measure your blood pressure and resting heart rate during the health assessment.

Your monitoring is carried out using the Tanita Inner Scan Body Composition Monitor. As well as measuring weight and body fat we will be able to fine tune your fitness programme by monitoring progress of muscle mass and basal metabolic rate. We will also be able to monitor visceral fat, a key indicator of the risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Tanita Body Composition Monitors use Bio-electrical Impedance Analysis (BIA). Safe, low level electrical signals are passed through the body via the patented Tanita footpads on the monitor platform. It is easy for the signal to flow through fluids in the muscle and other body tissues but meets resistance as it passes through body fat, as it contains little fluid. The resistance is called impedance. The impedance readings are then entered into medically researched mathematical formulas to calculate your body composition.

There are a number of ways to measure flexibility. We use the standard Sit & Reach test. This has been designed to assess and monitor the suppleness in the legs, hips and lower trunk. The measurement is made by the person curling the trunk forward and reaching with their hands as far along the centimetre scale as possible. Normal readings vary depending on your age and sex and we will advise you accordingly whether your flexibility is excellent, good, average or poor in comparison to the normative data for the UK Population.

Forced Expiratory Volume (FEV) is the volume of air expelled in the first second of maximal forced expiration from a position of full inspiration. The results can be used to calculate and display an equivalent ‘Lung Age’. The use of 'Lung Age' provides an additional motivational tool that may help susceptible smokers to understand the physical damage caused by smoking. It is important to measure Forced Expiratory Volume because it can help in the diagnosis, management and treatment during the early stages of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and help you to recognise when your lungs are not working to their full capacity.

Measures of waist and hip circumference provide useful information of weight loss within these regions and when the two measurements are compared, the resulting figure can act as an indication of detrimental fat deposition that may relate to coronary heart disease risk. The higher the result, the more fat is being stored around the midriff – therefore closer to the essential organs, including the heart. A higher waist to hip ratio has been shown to be a risk of coronary heart disease.