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I need to measure my fitness, so I wanted to know the following things:

  1. What items should be considered when determining if a person is completely fit.
  2. What tests are available to calculate the areas from question one.
Surjya Narayana Padhi
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    I would suggest breaking this question into multiple separate questions. Points 3, 4, and 5 are all unrelated to the question raised in the title. – Moses Feb 20 '13 at 03:37
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    Very related, except for the no equipment requirement: http://fitness.stackexchange.com/questions/9811/fitness-assessments –  Feb 20 '13 at 05:27
  • measuring fitness and motivation for getting fit, int he context of being a question, not an answer, arent really related. +1 to Moses – K.L. Feb 20 '13 at 12:23
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    Why do you need to measure your fitness? Why can't you use any equipment or instruments? – Dave Liepmann Feb 20 '13 at 14:08
  • @Moses I've removed the extra questions to keep it inline with the title, but the question still needs some work as it is still rather broad. –  Feb 26 '13 at 03:01
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    Well fitness is a task-specific measurement, ie powerlifters, marathon runners, and 90 year old women will all have a different scale as to what to judge their level of fitness against. Powerlifters will judge their level of fitness on how well they can squat, bench and deadlift with minimal to no pain, marathons will judge their fitness on how quickly they can run ~26 miles with minimal pain, and old ladies will measure their level of fitness on their ability to get around by themselves.

    So my question to you is, what sports do you compete in?

     – Brent Hronik Feb 26 '13 at 16:45

4 Answers4

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What should be considered when determining if a person is completely fit.

  • aerobic fitness
  • strength fitness
  • flexibility
  • recovery

What tests are available to calculate the areas from question one.

Meade Rubenstein
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For 1) and 2) I would recommend the bleep test. Its the standard used by the British armed forced and police among others. It only requires a cd of the test.

Tom Squires
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I would say how you recover tells you everything about your fitness and with that in mind:

  1. Your resting heart rate (and how quickly you can get back to it) should tell you a lot about your fitness and you can measure if by taking your own pulse. You might need a watch though so it might be cheating the no instrument specification you laid out there.
  2. See above.
Dave Liepmann
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Magpie
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As pointed out by Meade, there are military and government tests that try to encapsulate most areas of fitness (aerobic, strength, agility). I would argue that "balance" should be another area, but I'm not seeing this one covered under many of these tests. In summary, these appear to be capture enough aspects of fitness that they should be considered.

Here are some others in addition to what Meade pointed out, here is a reference for several other branches of military (US Army, US Navy, Coast Guard, etc): http://www.stewsmith.com/linkpages/pftstandards.htm

Dolan Antenucci
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