Fitness Self-Tests?

There is a book titled "Norms for Fitness, Performance and Health" by Jay Hoffman, that has information and norms for many dimensions of fitness, along with tests for those. The norms are generally in the form of tables by age/sex about what is normal or typical in various sub-populations.

It may be somewhat dated (copyright 2006 in my edition), but maybe your library has a copy you could look at, or could get one for you via interlibrary loan. Some of the tests are very doable on one's own, some require more specialized equipment, setup, or measurement devices.

Google has an overview and sample pages here:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Norms_for_Fitness_Performance_and_Health.html?id=3TzwC4likFoC

There are other similar books, and I'm sure Amazon or some other such site would be happy to suggest some. 😉

Here's an attached file, something I use. It's just a general all around assessment. Could work for you depending what you're into.

It looks at a few different categories such as strength, power, aerobic capacity and power, and muscle endurance.

You can always change out the exercises to suit your goals.

If you have a fitness tracker or even just a heart rate monitor, you can also look at the trend in morning resting heart rate (before getting out of bed, ideally with a natural wake-up vs. an alarm, if you you don't have a device that tracks this automagically). A tracker/HRM also enables you to note stats such as average or peak heart rate for a given activity at a given pace, such as a one-mile run at X mph. As you get cardiovascularly fitter, you'd expect resting heart rate to decline, and the heart rate required for a consistent activity to be lower as well.

Some of the more sophisticated fitness trackers will also measure or estimate other fitness metrics, too.

Hard to find because there are too many ways to define “fitness.” Who’s more fit a Major League Baseball pitcher or a fast marathon runner?

Maybe try a body fat measurement and assume that a good body fat percentage reflects good general fitness.

beabria wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

If you have a fitness tracker or even just a heart rate monitor, you can also look at the trend in morning resting heart rate (before getting out of bed, ideally with a natural wake-up vs. an alarm, if you you don't have a device that tracks this automagically). A tracker/HRM also enables you to note stats such as average or peak heart rate for a given activity at a given pace, such as a one-mile run at X mph. As you get cardiovascularly fitter, you'd expect resting heart rate to decline, and the heart rate required for a consistent activity to be lower as well.

Some of the more sophisticated fitness trackers will also measure or estimate other fitness metrics, too.

I actually have been monitoring this, and find it fascinating - but I'm not sure how much it is really reflecting my general fitness. I started a (very small) daily minimum exercise in January, and my resting heart rate went down (though I didn't lose any weight). Then in late May, I started changing my diet too, and started losing weight - and my resting heart rate plummeted. It's now bouncing around in the mid-to-upper 50s. But, I'm far from fit. I'm still (just) in the class 3 obesity area. I exercise regularly, but really doubt I could even run a slow mile (yet). So, I can't help wondering what's going to happen as I continue down this path because there's not really a whole lot of room to go! So - it's a really neat thing to see, but probably isn't going to be a good long-term indicator for me?

It will tend to level out someplace, but it's hard to say where. It can still be a useful thing to pay attention to. For example, one sign that one is persistently overdoing can be a persistent small rise in resting heart rate. (If you track it, you'll notice some other patterns in it, too, I suspect - mine will go up a bit the day after I eat substantial excess calories, for example.)

Also, even though resting heart rate does tend to level off eventually, the "heart rate for same activity" metric is still interesting/useful. It doesn't matter much what the activity is, as long as it's the same one you're using as a benchmark over a period of time. I just used running a mile as a random example. (I don't run at all, in fact 😉 - my bad knees won't take it!)

For myself, something like 2k on the rowing machine at a given fixed pace would be an example of a thing I could repeat periodically, see where my average heart rate and peak heart rate are trending for that workout. It could be walking a quarter mile or half mile at some particular mph/kph pace, if that's doable at this point for you.

As fitness keeps improving - assuming that's your goal and trajectory, as it sounds like - eventually the things you find manageable but a slight challenge now will become easy. (That's kind of the definition of fitness, y'know?) In that sense, the workout you use to track progress might want to change, gradually, over time - I don't think that makes picking one now, and tracking it for a while, useless, even if you don't use that same workout as your benchmark forever. Fitness evolves, goals evolve, etc.

A very good one, if you can get your hands on an Assault Bike (Rogue Echo, Assault Bike brand or AD Pro are the main brands) is to do a one-minute all out Watts test or similar. What is the average Watts you can do in one minute, as hard as you can. The more popular online version (on YouTube) is to see how many calories you can burn in one minute.

It's short enough that it won't likely kill you. And it's very intense, to test both your cardio and (somewhat) strength.

But if you're doing any kind of fitness test, please make sure you're medically/physically capable of handling it first.