The 5 Second Fitness Test You Can Do At Home
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Doesn’t getting your personal level of health and fitness require tons of lengthy tests? Not if you just want to get a pretty good idea.
Your Fitness Tested In 5 Seconds
The last time I had my fitness and health measured, I had to visit my doctor before work to drop in a blood sample, and on another day do a stress ECG and get my aerobic capacity measured via a VO2 max test.
All this takes time, lots of time. Not to mention that visiting my doctor at 8 am in fasted state is not very high on my list of fun things to do.
To at least give you an idea where you are standing, a recent discovery by Swedish researchers can help. They found that your maximum step-up height is pretty closely related to a number of health factors: general fitness, aerobic capacity, waist circumference and body weight.
How To Test It
The Swedes built a €1,500 machine to measure this as accurately as possible, but you won’t need to. All you need to have is a solid object to step up on:
- If you are male, you should be able to step up on an object at least 35 cm (13 1/3 inches) high
- If you are a woman, it should be 32 cm (12 1/2 inches)
- If you can’t manage at least 24 cm (9 1/2 inches) it’s time to do something about your health
This just screams to be tried out at home, so let me say it: do it safely. It’ll be detrimental to your health and fitness if you force yourself up on a 35 cm stool only to fall down.
Caveat Emptor, Of Course!
Also remember that this won’t replace a real examination, so don’t go postponing one because of this. Stepping up on a chair can’t measure your blood values or illnesses limiting your ability. That still takes seeing your doctor.
It also doesn’t really take your body height into account. My girlfriend is 4’11” and 32 cm are harder for her than for a woman of average height (5’4″).
How Did You Do?
That being said, she and I managed it with one of our kitchen chairs (45 cm), so I suppose we aren’t doing too badly. How did you do?
Picture courtesy of “le vent le cri“.
10 Comments
Um, I don’t consider myself to be an awesome physical shape by any means, but this seems like more a function of how long your legs are. Disclaimer, I’m a hockey goalie so my thighs are actually very well developed, so that’s probably skewing the test.
I climb up on things like this all the time to work on changing bulbs or light fixtures. So, for grins, I did a kitchen chair (17″) and then a barstool (24″). Easy. Office desk is 27″…a little tougher, but doable. Beyond that, I can only raise my leg to about 28″, so 27″ is probably all I can do. Keep in mind I’m 70″ tall with a hip height of 36″. Not bad for a guy who is still tipping the scales at 200lbs, but at least it’s not 235lbs anymore. And perhaps not impressive given my height. I dunno.
It could also be that you lost weight, but managed to preserve most of your muscular strength. It took, after all, some quite strong legs to carry those extra 35 lbs.
Did it say anything about step ups past 13″?
Yes: “wow, fit dude!” 🙂
I would try but I just sat down for the first time today – I’m pretty sure I can manage 32″!!!
And we are supposed to believe that? 😉
What a cool little test!
I wage you managed it! 😉
i dont understand what do u need to do ?
Take a chair at least 35 cm high and see if you can step on it without swinging.