Assessment, Tracking and Training Software

Successful health and wellness facilities are service organizations: they are defined by their ability to effectively and reliably help participants achieve their goals. To consistently achieve a high level of service for all of your participants, you'll need professional tools and a powerful database - you'll need the Fitness Analyst. It is the essential resource for facilities needing:

• Computer-controlled or personalized fitness assessments to enhance professionalism.
• Initial assessments to offer a baseline against which future progress is measured.
• Follow-up assessments to illustrate the impact of your service and as an incentive to improve.
• Medical screenings to enhance safety and even, potentially, to save a member's life.
• Easy to create, illustrated workouts to save time and boost efficiency. Add Motivation and participants can pick up workouts online.
• Energy analysis to boost the credibility and effectiveness of your weight management programs.
• Custom logs to help tailor each individual's program to their needs. Add Motivation and participants can enter the logs online.
• More fun in their program: just add group progress competitions!
• A revenue booster via fitness assessments, custom workouts, energy analysis, and more.
• To establish and strengthen relations with local medical providers with a more professional appearance and more detailed analyses.

The bottom line is that Fitness Analyst will add prestige and professionalism to your organization as well as enhancing retention and revenue!

Services offered by Fitness Analyst:

Fitness Assessment

Fitness assessment is the heart of the Fitness Analyst and should be a critical part of any health facility's client service program. In implementing fitness assessment, we've focused on change over time and progress towards a goal. This helps ensure that that your assessments build both loyalty to your facility and a higher degree of adherence to your program.

The Fitness Analyst supports all the most commonly used fitness assessments including skinfold pinch bodyfat, cycle ergometry, treadmill and field tests for cardiovascular fitness, pulmonary tests, a broad variety of strength and endurance tests (push-up, sit-up, crunch, max bench press, leg press, and many more), and a variety of flexibility tests (including the sit and reach and modified sit and reach). It also features an exhaustive help system with documentation for each of these fitness tests as well as an "Ergometry Wizard" to walk you through accurate ergometry testing. It also integrates with products from Cateye and Tanita to automate your cardiovascular and bodyfat testing at levels of accuracy far higher than you'll find from the competition.

In addition to supporting common tests from the ACSM’s “Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription” and the CSEP’s CPAFLA, Fitness Analyst is the only software licensed to offer the Rikli-Jones Senior Fitness Test. We also support the “Wellness-Fitness Initiative” (firefighter) tests as well as youth tests such as the President’s Council, NCYFS and FitnessGram. In all, the Analyst has the most comprehensive testing library of any source in the world: over 120 tests. Of course, you won't use all of these tests, but the library does make it easy for you to create the perfect protocol for any participant and can easily adapt to specialty populations.

The Fitness Analyst will permit you to create your own fitness tests and norms and to customize the feedback given to your clients based on their results.

When you perform bodyfat testing, you can provide results based on the norms from the ACSM/Cooper Clinic, the YMCA or the US NHANES studies. When performing cardiovascular capacity testing (Vo2Max) you can select from the ACSM/Cooper, the CPAFLA (Canadian), the YMCA or the UK Allied-Dunbar study. No other testing system offers you the flexibility of the Fitness Analyst!

The true measure of our software, however, comes when it is time to provide results to your clients. The reports that you print will truly be the most important way for you to illustrate the professionalism of your facility. Fitness Analyst’s reports are well-designed, colorful, and very easy to read. The will, without question, provide you with the sophisticated, professional image for which you strive!
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Senior Assessments

BSDI is proud to have been selected by the folks at the Center for Successful Aging at Cal-State Fullerton to be the sole licensee of the Rikli-Jones Senior Fitness Test as well as the Fullerton Advanced Balance Scale. The Fitness Analyst Senior Edition adds these two excellent senior assessments as a senior-friendly medical assessment questionnaire to the standard Analyst.

The Rikli-Jones Senior Fitness Test is the only suite of fitness assessments specifically targeted to the 65+ population. The advantage is that the normative data is broken down for each 5-year span from 65 to 95 (a time of significant change). In contrast, all other fitness tests feature (at best) one category of normative data for people over 65. Because the data collection efforts for other tests have not focused on seniors, the normative data tends to be clustered around individuals in the 65-70 age range and in better health than the actual senior population. Thus, the normative feedback simply doesn't apply to the actual senior population. The Rikli-Jones protocol overcomes all of these problems and features fitness tests that are quite functional and focused on the needs and capabilities of the senior population.

The Fullerton Advanced Balance Scale (FABS) is a balance and mobility assessment that is ideal for higher-functioning senior citizens. It will help you understand a variety of impairments characteristic of the senior population ("poor center-of-gravity control", "vestibular impairment") and even help you plan exercise-based interventions to overcome or mitigate these impairments.
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Medical Screening 

The Fitness Analyst provides a variety of tools for medical screening: the ACSM Screening Questionnaire (as recently revised by the ACSM), the PARQ, and our own "Medical Health Questionnaire" (MHQ). The ACSM and PARQ questionnaires are used to determine whether someone should consult a physician for more detailed testing before having a fitness assessment or beginning exercise.

The MHQ asks all of the questions not found on the ACSM and PARQ instruments: family history, other disease conditions, orthopedic injuries, prescriptions, etc.

Once data has been entered into the system, you can search for clients based on the results for any medical question or on the overall screening results (e.g. "All At-Risk Participants").

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Exercise Programming 

Fitness Analyst provides a suite of powerful tools for creating tailored exercise programs for your clients. Choose from hundreds of free-weight, stability ball, band/tubing, Yoga and Pilates exercises when creating workouts or add your own. Exercises come with photographs and descriptions that you can print right on your workout cards. Add your own photos with any digital camera!

Our new Intelli-Max workout template technology lets you create workouts in mere seconds while supporting features such as complex set patterns, specification of lift tempo and inter-set rest. You can even create multiple templates following a periodization pattern of varying intensities.

When finished constructing your workout, you can print either a simple workout grid, a detailed grid with pictures and description, just the pictures, or a “workout schedule” wherein multiple workouts are automatically coordinated over time.

If you purchase Motivation and an online license for the Analyst, then workouts you create here will automatically be available to your participants when they sign in to Motivation. They need only click a link to see their workouts, review the pictures and descriptions, and log their workouts for you!
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Goals Counseling & Exercise History 

Earn the trust and loyalty of your clients by helping them clarify their fitness Goals. Our goals counseling area features a “motivational interview” format as well as user-definable goal check boxes and a place to record your clients’ commitments to healthier living.

The Fitness Analyst also provides an Exercise Habits and Interests page for you to record each client’s preferred exercise modality as well as information about their exercise frequency, years exercising, typical intensity, etc.
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Energy Expenditure / Weight Management 

To serve your weight management program, Fitness Analyst offers a versatile and powerful Energy Expenditure page. This page and its supporting materials help you to estimate a participant's Basal Metabolic rate (BMR) using either the new Mifflin equations (based on Weight and Height), the Katch-McArdle equations (weight and bodyfat), or via direct entry (e.g. if you have a BodyGem or similar gas exchange device).

Basal Metabolic rate is just the beginning, however. Unlike most analyses that merely multiply the resting metabolic rate time an "activity factor" to arrive at Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), Fitness Analyst actually collects data in an "Activity Diary" that is not unlike a food diary. Once the data has been collected (for 1, 2 or 3 days) it is entered via a special "wizard" on the Energy page. The participant's average TDEE is then calculated printed using the Energy Balance report. This report will not only capture the entered data and the summary calorie expenditure, it is an excellent introduction to weight management strategy.

Note: The Analyst can work side-by-side with gas exchange equipment to increase accuracy. You should not, however, assume that that such equipment is required or, in particular, that the final TDEE data produced by these expensive systems is better than that produced by the Analyst.

This is because a total caloric estimate has two components: the starting estimate of basal metabolic rate and the 'activity level' estimates that are multiplied by the BMR to arrive at total calories. While the BMR equations offered in the Analyst are the most accurate available (the Mifflin and Katch-McArdle), they are not as good as having a gas-exchange device. However, our activity level estimation tools provide feedback that is far superior to the 'Activity Multiplier' usually used by the gas-exchange equipment makers! It is thus often the case that our TDEE estimates are better than those produced by equipment costing thousands of dollars.
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Individual and Group Reports

The Fitness Analyst features a variety of attractive, professional reports and charts. You will use these to communicate results to your participants, to analyze progress over time, to pinpoint weaknesses, and - perhaps most important of all - to ensure that you always project a polished, professional image. There are also a broad array of group reports that can break down results by a single facility (e.g. Dallas Facility), unit or division (e.g. 37th services) or arbitrarily assigned group (e.g. weight management group, red team, infielders). You can also run group reports that compare two facilities, units/divisions, or groups.

We have spared no effort in creating the most compelling, professional reports possible. You can even export reports as PDF files for easy emailing. There are literally dozens of reports and charts covering both individual and group analyses.

Useability and the BSDI Help System 

At BSDI, we have a reputation for building software that is powerful and yet natural and easy to use. Our first committment is simply to organize the software in such a way as to make it as intuitive as possible. This organization is evident in our "Folder and Page" user interface - an interface that we subjected to extensive useability testing to ensure that real trainers in the real world can learn the system quickly.

Next, we packed the Fitness Analyst with an extensive help system and several detailed, click-by-click tutorials showing how to use the software. The help system is the most comprehensive of its kind and features over 200 topics: everything from how to use particular dialog boxes to how to administer a bodyfat pinch test!

We've converted the Analyst's help system into a series of web pages so you can see how detailed and complete it is. Note: the conversion process resulted in formatting that is a bit more primitive than you'll find on the rest of BSDI's web site (e.g., you'll want to expand the menu frame on the left so it is wider). However, you'll certainly understand why we are so proud of this comprehensive resource if you take some time to look around.

Finally, the software features a variety of multimedia tutorials showing how each component works. We packaged the core tutorial as part of our Multimedia BSDI Demo. We encourage you to download the demo so that you can learn more about the details of working with our software.
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Other Features 

• Weight Trackingenhances your weight management programs!
• Blood Pressure Logging is essential in cardiac rehab or intervention programs.
• Body Circumferences Page lets you store measurements for every area of the body (and both sides).
• Unlimited User-Defined Fields permit you to collect data your way.
• Flexible Blood Chemistry - collect any values and track them over time relative to “safe” ranges.
• Powerful Query Wizard helps you select, analyze, and report on any cross-section of your database. You can export to Excel or even send bulk email to everyone selected by a query!
• Before/After Photography integrates with your digital camera so you can store photos of your clients. This area of the software actually provides a general-purpose image-storage facility for each participant. Enterprising clients of ours have used it for storing JPG images of ECG traces as well as other scanned images received from outside sources!

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BSDI: More Accurate 

At BSDI, we've always believed that personlized fitness assessments are better than computerized assessments for most traditional fitness tests. For example, the most popular general upper body strength test in the literature is the simple push-up. This test recruits a variety of muscles and joints, requires some degree of core stabilization, and has some of the best population (normative) data of any test in the field. However, there is no practical way to have a computer monitor a push-up test (it would be overkill anyway). In response, makers of "computerized" assessment systems attach a computer to a strain gauge and ask participants to do a static curl-up on a bar instead! Not only is this test a much poorer measurement of upper body strength, it is far easier to 'cheat' on the test (start the test with weight back on your heels and rock backward imperceptibly and you can add 10% or more to your score).

In essence, some competitors feel it is more important for the computer to monitor your fitness testing than it is to actually give appropriate tests!

One area where it does truly makes sense to have the computer monitor a fitness test is in cycle ergometry. This is simply because this is a fairly complex test. Unfortunately for our competitors, they locked in years ago to a class of ergometers with a primitive method for creating a cycling workload: using straps to cause friction. The established error range for these ergometers is about 8% of the value requested. Thus, a requested workload of 100 watts will actually result in a workload somewhere between 92 and 108 watts. And that is if the ergometer is accurately and recently calibrated!

The Fitness Analyst integrates with the Cateye EC-1600 Cycle Ergometer for fully automated ergometry testing. We chose the EC-1600 because it is a DIN-certified, therapeutic-grade ergometer with an electromagnetic brake that never needs calibration. Thus, not only is it easier to use, it is also far more accurate (less than 3% error). Simply put, BSDI offers a more accurate fitness assessment product - and one with a far greater diversity of tests - than any other vendor in the world.