How can a private health assessment help with keeping your health and fitness goals on track this New Year?
The New Year is a time when many of us set fresh resolutions. While these goals can vary widely, a significant number focus on improving health—whether it’s losing weight, getting fitter, or enhancing overall wellbeing. However, without a clear understanding of your current health status, setting realistic and achievable goals can be challenging. Undetected health issues, such as underlying conditions, nutrient deficiencies, or hormonal imbalances, may unknowingly hinder your progress.
In this blog, we’ll explore how a private health assessment can provide you with crucial insights into your health, empowering you to set informed goals and stay on track with your fitness ambitions this New Year.
What can a private health assessment tell you about your health?
A private health assessment can offer vital insights into your overall health, which can be useful if you are planning to set yourself achievable New Year health and fitness goals.
Weight, BMI and body composition
Losing weight is one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions, but setting meaningful weight loss goals starts with understanding where you are now. Without knowing your current weight or body composition, it’s difficult to create a plan that’s both effective and achievable.
At Bluecrest, our private health assessments go beyond just measuring your weight and BMI. Using advanced body composition scans, we provide a detailed breakdown of your body’s makeup—including muscle mass, visceral fat, body water, and more. These in-depth insights empower you to set realistic, personalised weight loss targets that align with your unique body composition and health needs.
Risk of certain health conditions
Before embarking on a new health and fitness regime, it can be useful to know if you are at heightened risk of common health conditions like heart disease or diabetes. This knowledge can help you address any issues that could be exacerbating your risk of some conditions. It could be as simple as making dietary changes to reduce your sugar or salt intake.
Knowing your risk of common health conditions can also ensure you take any necessary precautions and seek appropriate medical advice before making any changes to your diet and activity levels.
At Bluecrest our health assessment packages offer insights into your risk of:
- High cholesterol
- Heart disease and stroke
- Diabetes
- Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) – in those aged 40-79
Blood pressure
Healthy blood pressure is essential for overall wellbeing and can prevent serious health problems. Although both high and low blood pressure can cause health problems, high blood pressure affects most adults in the UK (approximately one in three).
High blood pressure can significantly increase the risk of serious health complications, like heart attacks and strokes. However, as there are often no symptoms associated with high blood pressure, it can go unnoticed for years. This means getting your blood pressure checked regularly is essential, and it's why a blood pressure check is included as standard in all our private health assessment packages.
You can find out more about how often you should have your blood pressure checked in our guide.
Heart rhythm
Your heart rhythm provides vital insights into how well your heart is working and how this may affect your health and fitness goals. For example, an irregular heart rhythm can put you at increased risk of strokes as it increases your risk of blood clots.
At Bluecrest, we use an electrocardiogram (ECG) to check your heart rate, rhythm, and electrical activity over a short period.
Learn more about how an ECG can help show heart problems.
Key organ function
To function optimally, your body relies on key organs like the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. If any of these are not working correctly, it can affect your overall health and wellbeing, which could potentially hamper your New Year fitness goals.
With a private health assessment, you can gain insights into your kidney, heart, and liver function through a simple blood test, while your lung health can be checked using a breathing test known as spirometry.
Bone health
Having strong and healthy bones is important as we age as our risk of developing weak, fragile bones or conditions like osteoporosis naturally increases.
Testing the levels of calcium in your blood, a mineral essential for healthy bone formation can help indicate whether you have sufficient calcium levels.
Energy function
Sticking to your New Year's resolutions will require determination and energy to power you through the days when you don’t feel like getting active.
Having a blood test to test your energy function can be beneficial as it ensures that if you have a vitamin or mineral deficiency that may affect your energy levels, you can seek appropriate treatment.
Immune health
Your body’s immune health is its ability to fight off infections and keep you healthy. This means making sure it’s working correctly can be vital to you reaching your health and fitness goals.
At Bluecrest, we offer an immune system health check that assesses your white blood cell count and platelet count to offer insights into your immune health as part of our Core and Complete private health assessment packages.
Hormone health
Hormones can also play a significant role in the normal functioning of our bodies. Hormonal imbalances can impact everything from your metabolism to your weight and energy levels, so getting your hormone health checked may be a vital step before setting out your New Year health and fitness goals.
We offer a range of hormone profile packages designed for men and women to enable you to gain key insights into your hormone levels. These can be booked as standalone tests or added to our comprehensive health assessment packages to provide comprehensive insights into your health.
Why is knowing more about your health the key to your health and fitness goals?
Now that you know a bit more about the kind of health insights private health assessments offer, it's important to consider why these insights are vital to keeping your New Year's health and fitness goals on track.
Some of the key benefits of knowing more about your health can include:
- Making you aware of any existing health conditions – Knowing if you have or are at risk of certain health conditions can ensure that you adapt your health and fitness goals appropriately.
- Making you aware of any underlying issues – Vitamin and mineral deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, or underlying conditions such as poor immune system health, can all impact your ability to achieve certain health targets. Getting insights first allows you to take appropriate action to treat any underlying issues or adapt your health goals as needed.
- Providing you with baseline readings—Whether you want to lose weight, reduce your cholesterol or blood pressure, or simply improve your overall well-being, a private health assessment can provide you with baseline measurements from which to set achievable targets.
- Ensuring progress is trackable – Vital health readings like your cholesterol level or blood pressure can be recorded and tracked, enabling you to see if you are making progress.
- Ensuring you set safe goals—While any improvements to your health and wellbeing are a positive step, if you have existing health conditions, it’s important to discuss your health and fitness plans with your GP to ensure that your goals are safe and appropriate. Having the insights from a private healthcare assessment can help facilitate the conversation with tangible results.
Top tips for keeping your health and fitness goals on track this new year
To keep your health and fitness New Year goals on track, we recommend:
- Setting yourself SMART goals – these are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. For example, instead of setting yourself the goal of losing weight, you might set yourself the goal of losing four pounds by the end of January.
- Break your goals down into smaller, more achievable goals - For example, if you want to start following a healthier diet, you can start by introducing one or two daily changes like snacking on fruit or vegetables instead of crisps or biscuits, as this is more achievable than completely overhauling your diet at once. For tips on healthy eating, check our ???guide to what is the most healthy diet.
- Share your goals with friends or family – This will help keep you accountable.
- Stay flexible – Plans change, and life doesn’t always go to plan, so it’s important to stay flexible to keep your health and fitness goals on track.
- Track your progress – This could be recording your weight loss, monitoring your fitness levels, tracking your heart rate, taking pictures of your progress, or booking a follow-up private health assessment to track any health improvements. You can do whatever works for you to help you stay on track.
Book a private health assessment
If you’re keen to make lasting changes to your health and fitness this New Year, we recommend taking a proactive approach to prioritising your health by booking a private health check. Our full body health MOTs are designed to provide comprehensive insights into your general health by including a range of private blood checks, such as a full blood count, liver and kidney tests and cholesterol and diabetes checks as well as insights into your risk of certain health conditions.
You can book private health MOTs across the UK, so it is easy to find a convenient location for private laboratory blood testing. Plus, you can be confident that we will deliver fast, efficient and accurate results, as we have established links with leading UK laboratories and are fully accredited for a wide range of private blood checks.
