How to Track Your Fitness Progress
Learn how to test your endurance, strength, weight, body fat, and movement skills.
Ben Greenfield
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How to Track Your Fitness Progress
In an earlier episode about the Top 6 New Year’s Resolution Mistakes, I talked about how tracking your fitness progress can help to keep you motivated and set realistic and specific goals. But what’s the best way to track your fitness progress? Should you see how fast you can run a mile? How many push-ups or sit-ups you can do? How much you weigh?
In this episode, you’ll learn the best tests you can do to track your fitness progress, and how to test your endurance, strength, weight, body fat, and movement skills. You should try to perform each of these tests approximately every 4 weeks (e.g. at the beginning of every month).
How to Test Your Endurance
In What Is The Fat Burning Zone?, you learn how to determine your maximum fat burning heart rate zone with a simple bicycle test. That same test can be used to keep track of your endurance – and since it doesn’t involve sprinting and impact, it can be used even if you have something like knee pain or low back pain.
Here’s how to test your endurance:
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Warm up on a bike for 10 minutes.
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Pedal at your maximum sustainable pace for 20 minutes, at rate of 80-90RPM (make sure you keep the RPM constant every time you repeat the test). You should be breathing hard and your legs should be burning, but you should be able to maintain the same intensity for the full 20 minutes.
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Record your average heart rate during those 20 minutes. If the bike shows power on the screen (typically as “watts”) or speed, you should also record that.
At the end of the test, write down your average heart rate, and if available, your speed and your power. Each month, your speed and power should increase, while your average heart rate remains the same – which indicates that your muscles and heart can do more and work more efficiently over a longer period of time. For an extra test of your cardiovascular health, record your heart rate exactly 60 seconds after you finish the test. You should see that heart rate decrease each month, indicating that you’re recovering more quickly.
If you find this endurance test too long, here is a simpler one called the 3-minute step test:
Using a 12 inch bench, and music or a metronome set at 90-100 beats per minute, simply step up, up and down, down for 3 minutes. Record your heart rate immediately after finishing, and then 1 minute later. Both those heart rates should decrease each month, signaling improved endurance.
How to Test Your Strength
While a “one repetition maximum bench press,” or “1RM Max” is a common method to measure strength, it can easily result in injury. For most people (with the exception of experienced athletes) a simple maximum push-up and maximum squat test will work just fine to test your strength.
For the push-up test, if you have difficulty performing a single push-up, then you should do a “knee push-up.” The instructions are simple: you must lower your chest all the way to the ground, then push yourself back up, and record the maximum number of push-ups you can do in one minute.
For the squat test, you can place your hands behind your head, or extend them in front of the body as you sit into a body weight squat, keeping your back straight, your butt out, and your knees behind your toes. Record the maximum number of squats you can do in one minute. For tips on proper squatting form, watch the video at How To Squat Safely.
How to Test Your Weight and Body Fat
In the episode How To Measure Body Fat, I explained several methods of testing body fat, including “DEXA,” “Hydrostatic Weighing,” and a “Bod Pod.” Unfortunately, these tests can be expensive, especially if you’re repeating them each month.
For this reason, it is best to simply use a body fat scale, or a handheld body fat measurement device, both of which use a method called “bioelectrical impedance” to measure your body fat. While this method is not the most accurate, it is easily repeatable, and you simply need to ensure that you test yourself in a similar state of hydration and at a similar time of day as your previous test. If you use a body fat scale, it will also record your weight. Because these tests are short and simple to perform, you can repeat them often, even each week. Just remember: you may experience weeks during which your fitness significantly improves, but your body fat doesn’t change – and that is normal and not something to fret about!
If you have someone to help you, you can also perform a waist and hip circumference test, in which you measure the narrowest part of your waist and the widest part of your hips. You can then keep track of your waist:hip ratio by dividing the waist number by the hip number. A waist to hip ratio of 0.7 for women and 0.9 for men has been shown to correlate strongly with general health, so this is a good number to track.
How to Test Your Movement Skills With a Functional Movement Screen
When it comes to sports performance, reducing risk of injury, and moving with more grace and ease, there are 5 important movements that you should be able to perform with proficiency. They are:
Among physical therapists and exercise scientists, these 5 movements are known as a “functional movement screen.” Check out this functional movement screen video that shows you how to perform and score yourself on each movement, along with a scoring sheet.
You can easily keep track of your endurance, strength, weight, body fat, and movement skills on a monthly chart, a blog, a computer document, or simply a notebook. By tracking these numbers, you keep yourself motivated, and also learn whether what you’re doing is actually working!
If you have more questions about how to track your fitness progress, or your own tips about how to change up a workout, share them in Comments or on the Get-Fit Guy Facebook page!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
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