Medical Readiness for Physical Activity

The ACSM has published a new version of “Recommendations for Exercise Preparticipation Health Screening.” These new recommendations are an update of the most recent ACSM's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription (9th ed.) published in 2014.

The information on pages 73-74 in your text is not affected by the new recommendations. Also, the information presented for Web Topic 2 in chapter 3 is still correct.The PAR-Q (discussed at the link) is still useful because it focuses on signs and symptoms, not risk factors (which are deleted from the new recommendations).

Although information in your text is not affected by the new recommendations, you might be interested to learn what has changed. The recommendations no longer use CVD risk factors as a central part of the screening process. Note that although risk factor screening is no longer part of preparticipation screening, it is important for helping to identify disease risk.

The change in recommendations was made because CVD risk factors are not predictive of adverse CV events and current guidelines may be too conservative (Megal & Riebe, 2016). Extremely conservative guidelines might discourage physical activity participation.

The new recommendations focus on the following:

1. The individual’s current level of physical activity
2. Presence of signs or symptoms of known cardiovascular, metabolic, or renal disease
3. The desired exercise intensity because these variables have been identified as risk modulators of exercise-related cardiovascular events (Reibe et al., 2015)

For those who are interested, additional information about the new recommendations is available in the following references.

Megal, M., & Riebe, D. (2016). New preparticipation health screening recommendations: What exercise professionals need to know. ACSM’s Health and Fitness Journal, 20(3), 22-27.

Riebe, D., et al. (2015). Updating ACSM's recommendations for exercise preparticipation health screening. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 47(11), 2473–2479

Source: C.B. Corbin (July 2016) Based on previous references.