Top 10 DIY ways to test your fitness
Resting heart rate – to assess aerobic fitness
Counting the number of beats of your resting heart rate (RHR) is a useful way of indicating your fitness progress. It should reduce as your aerobic fitness improves. Here's our guide to working out your daily RHR.
Read more…Push-ups – to assess upper-body muscular endurance
Push-ups are a great indicator of your upper body strength and the progress of your muscle building exercise. Here's our guide to using push-ups as a way of seeing whether your exercise routine needs to be further developed.
Read more…Head turning – to assess neck flexibility
Testing the flexibility of your neck will tell you how much more stretching and mobilizing exercise you need to do to fully protect it from feeling tight. Here's our guide to a neck workout that will indicate your current neck exercise progress.
Read more…12-minute walk/run test – to assess cardiovascular capacity
Kenneth Cooper – the man credited for inventing ‘aerobics’ – developed his ‘Cooper Test’ way back, but it’s still widely used as a measure of cardiovascular fitness. The test is mainly designed for running exercise – but you can walk it if necessary.
Read more…Plank – to assess core stability
You’ve almost certainly heard of core stability (the strength and function of the deep stabilizing muscles of the trunk) – but have you got any? ‘The plank’ will give you the answer, as it is a position that you will find difficult to hold if your core stability is poor. Simply practicing this exercise movement will soon get your core stabilizers firing.
Read more…Loop-the-loop – to assess shoulder mobility
Hours working at a computer, surfing the net, watching TV, driving or simply sitting with poor posture can cause the shoulders to tighten up and the joints to lose mobility. The loop-the-loop exercise test therefore assesses your shoulder mobility in all directions.
Read more…Wet footprint test – to assess foot strike pattern in running
Words like pronation and motion control are bandied around freely in running and fitness circles, but short of forking out for a full-scale gait analysis, how do you know what type of foot and foot strike pattern you have? This test will give you a basic picture of your running gait.
Read more…Vertical jump – to assess explosive power
Power is the ability to exert a force quickly. It’s what gets sprinters off the blocks and basketballers shooting hoops. To exert power, all your muscle fibers have to be recruited, so people with lots of endurance, but less strength, are often quite poor at it. Here's the realbuzz.com guide to working out your power explosivity.
Read more…Waist-to-hip ratio – to assess body fat distribution
Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is an assessment of the proportion of fat stored around the waist compared to the hip girth. Having an apple shape (carrying excess fat around the stomach) is worse for your health than having a pear shape (carrying excess baggage around your hips or thighs), as it is associated with heart disease and diabetes. Here's the realbuzz test to see how your weight is distributed.
Read more…Wall sit – to assess leg strength/endurance
This exercise test – in which you sit on an ‘invisible chair’ against a wall until your thighs tighten – gives a good idea of your lower-body strength. Here's the realbuzz.com guide on how to do this exercise routine and see how strong your lower body is.
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