The most currently inept fitness training enthusiast can outline his own testing program by using some of the following rules:
Measure areas relevant to your own recreational activity.
If you use a bicycle, time yourself once in a while over the same route. Do not think that a certain number of deep knee bends will greatly improve your ability to pitch a pup tent.
Always test yourself under the same conditions.
Time of day, mood, weather, recent sleeping habits, and many other factors should be as similar as possible.
Measure for greater endurance.
If you are now able to use your cross trainer for 21 minutes, see if you can up this to 22 minutes. Or if you are weight-lifting 20 pounds ten times, see if you can press eleven times.
Measure for greater strength.
If you are now completing six laps of the pool in 21 minutes, how about six and a half laps in the same time? If you are now pressing 20 pounds ten times, how about 25 pounds ten times?
Measure your own improvement.
Fitness tests should not compare one sportsman with another or be used on a one-shot basis. Repeated evaluations are the key to good fitness tests.
They should be used as a guide for the individual sportsman in his evaluation of self-improvement.
In fact, most sportsmen know their general condition without ever resorting to formal testing.
If you are seeking general fitness, then devise over-all tests. Fitness should be total and not restricted to one area of the body. A hard workout for the legs without paying some attention to the arms. In testing yourself, test arms, trunk, and legs.
Make the goals simple
Give yourself enough to accomplish in a few weeks—or you will go stale and lose interest.
A fifty-year-old executive who has been sedentary for twenty years may find a single push-up impossible. It might take him six discouraging months to be able to do two.
Using some home fitness equipment with regulated goals will help him move forward in a constructive and rewarding way
If the above suggestions are incorporated into your own program of fitness evaluation, more technically scientific methods are unnecessary. However, properly understood, these tests do have value. Perhaps you may wish to adapt portions of them for yourself.
