What is fitness testing and why do we need it?
Fitness testing allows us to measure our progress over time, especially when we don’t have competitions to track our improvements. We need to ensure we are tracking movements/activities that are appropriate to our sport and/or athletic goals. So, for sport aerobics, we should be tracking our fitness level, strength & power and flexibility. As the season progresses, we will naturally track our skill and choreography/routine progress, but this article focuses on our base fitness, strength and flexibility as these can be harder to track through the season.
It’s imperative that how you test your fitness is easily replicated in the exact same way each time you test so that your measurements are accurate. I explain this in more detail with each test.
After each testing round, we can see where we are improving and how we need to adjust our training if we’re not meeting our goals.
This article gives you ideas and tips for:
- warming up before a fitness test
- measuring cardiovascular fitness
- measuring leg power (based on strength)
- measuring lactic training using upper body (push ups) and whole body (burpees) movements
- measuring abdominal power, and
- measuring flexibility.
Obviously this article is free but if you’d like to support my work, you can purchase the downloadable, printable journal that goes with this course. It includes a brief overview of each component (so you don’t have to take notes!) and space to record your own fitness testing results, notes etc. It also has QR codes for each of the videos so you’ll be directly linked to my YouTube videos without having to search for them (or scroll this post)! You can purchase the journal here.
Warm up
It’s important that you are really warm before completing any kind of physical testing. Ensure you are puffing and possibly lightly sweaty. It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you are warming up the appropriate muscles for the type of fitness test you are going to do. You do not need to do all your fitness tests in one day, so you might like to just warm up legs and do the lower body components etc. For example, a light jog before doing a running fitness test, or a few ‘easy’ push ups before doing the push up test.
In the video, I demonstrate a shortened version of a whole body warm up. I’d recommend repeating the video 3-5 times if you are going to use these movements as your warm up.
1) Cardiovascular testing
The easiest way to test your cardiovascular fitness is to choose a particular distance to run and time yourself. Then the next time you test yourself (if your training has been effective), you would hopefully cover the same distance faster.
Examples of distances you could use:
- Your local athletics track: 400m or 800m
- To the end of your road and back
- To a particular letterbox on your street
- Between goal posts on a rugby or soccer field
- A particular number of shuttle runs between two trees or the fences in your back yard
You want to choose a distance that will take approximately 3 minutes to complete. The exact distance doesn’t matter, as long as you can replicate the EXACT SAME test the next time you do your fitness testing. So make a note of what you did when you record your results.
You can use the stopwatch function on your phone and time yourself, or ask a friend/family member to time you. I’d recommend doing the test 2-3 times and recording your best time.
2) Jump tests
To have explosive leg power, we must have leg strength. So we can test our strength & power by completing two measured jumps:
- horizontal jump (often called a broad jump)
- vertical jump
To measure your horizontal jump, simply stand behind a line, jump as far forward as you can and measure the distance.
If you’re measuring your own jump, it might be helpful to dip your shoes in a puddle so you can see your mark easily (see video below). Or if you local athletic park is accessible, you might be able to use the long-jump sand pit there.
To measure your vertical jump, first stand against a wall and record a line at the top of your fingertips. Chalk or a pencil work well as they can easily be removed. Then simply jump as high as you can and record a mark at the top of your jump. You can jump from stationery or step in as I do in the video.
Complete each jump 3 times and record your best distance for each jump.
3) Push up test
This simple test checks your push up power and anaerobic fitness. The most important bit is to ensure your push ups go full range, so choose a yoga block (as in the video) or a soft toy or similar that you can tap with your chest at the lowest point of your push up. Check that when you do touch your chest to the item that your elbows have at least 90 degrees of flexion which is the same as having your upper arm horizontal or your shoulder at or slightly below your elbow (so you could video a couple to check or get a friend/family member to make sure you’re going full range). It’s also worthwhile having a spotter or videoing your test so you can check that you go all the way to the top of your range too (i.e. elbows extended/straight at the top, but not ‘locked’).
You can choose whether you do your push ups from knees or toes but you do want it to be a decent challenge.
Try to have the best form you can throughout but really you just want to push out as many as you can, as fast as you can, whilst getting full range of motion (i.e. 90 degrees of elbow flexion at the bottom and straight elbows at the top).
Then start your stopwatch! I suggest doing one minute, but whatever timeframe you choose, make sure you keep it the same at your next test.
Don’t forget to count every push up and record your total.
4) Sit up test
The most important part of a sit up test is to keep each sit up and each test consistent. For this reason, I use diamond sit ups so that I can touch my toes in the sit up phase, and I reach above my head to tap the floor in the down phase. I don’t personally ‘do’ sit ups as an exercise but this is a nice equipment-free, simple test to check abdominal power. Don’t forget to count your sit ups and record your total.
You could choose to do a timed plank – where you hold plank position for as long as you can. Then record your time. Or almost any abdominal exercise you want – as long as you can do every movement exactly the same.
5) Burpee test
This is a highly effective test for us sport aerobic athletes. Simply start a timer and complete as many burpees as you can. I chose to do 90 seconds because this is the length of my routine this year.
I tap my feet together in the jump phase to keep each burpee as consistent as possible. You could add a push up in the plank phase if you want an extra challenge.
Remember to brace your core throughout and keep your back long and straight.
Try not to stop – slow down if you have to and focus on keeping a rhythm going. Go for it!
6) Flexibility tests
You’re almost there – this is the final test!
If you’ve done all the other tests right before this, you should be pretty warm but doing some leg swings (loose, fluid high kick movements) and anything else that helps relax & lengthen your hamstrings, hips, glutes and adductors (groins) will help.
Then all you need to do is take photos of your splits – left leg, right leg, middle/straddle – and a seated hamstring stretch. Try to keep your camera/phone parallel to your body so that you get a really good side view of how far you are from the ground or your legs. Or, for straddle, you can take a higher angle photo so you can see how wide your split is.
Remember to keep your hips as square as possible (tuck your knee under at the back and hips perpendicular to your legs), and I like to keep my front leg as straight as possible to keep the comparison between each set of photos as similar as possible. I can in my hamstring stretch photo below that my legs were not quite straight so I’ll be looking for that in my next photo session.
Final tips
The most important thing to remember is to take notes with your records so that you do the EXACT same tests and way of measuring in your next fitness test.
You can basically do any ‘tests’ you like as long as they are the same each testing round and they are appropriate to your sport/goals. For example, you could add chin ups, or change the run for double-under skipping, or similar.
Don’t forget to record your results. Adding a note to your phone and including your split photos is a good way of doing it, and you can set a reminder to do the tests again in 6 weeks.
If you’d like a downloadable and printable journal of this article which includes the key points, QR codes for all the videos and space to record your results, you can purchase it here (this also supports me to keep providing resources like this to you and other athletes). Thank you! 🙂
I hope this information has been helpful. If you have ANY questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: abbyjaneaerobics@gmail.com or you can find me on Instagram @abbyjaneaerobics
Happy fitness testing! 🙂
