• There are 9 main adaptations that the body can go through

  • Skill or technique
  • Speed
  • Power
  • Force / strength
  • Hypertrophy
  • Endurance
  • Anaerobic capacity (maximum amount of work you can do in 30s-120s)
  • Maximal aerobic capacity (8-15mins of work)
  • Long duration exercise (steady state training)

• Much like everything, before we start any program, we need to first assess where we are. These are notes about assessing your fitness accross these adaptations.

Testing skill and technique

• Pick an exercise that you want to get better at
• Try to pick a push and pull for the upper and lower body
  • something like a pull up, push up, squat and a dead lift.
  • do all of this with bodyweight and do it in a controlled fashion
• Record yourself from the front and side view.
• Do 3 reps per view
• Then look at the video, these are the things to look out for
• Assymmetry
  • Is one side of your body different to the other ?
  • Like in a push up, is one of your elbows flaring more ?
• Stability
  • Can you do the movement slow and controlled ?
  • Did you notice yourself struggling or shaking through any parts of it ?
• Awareness
  • Were you aware of every body part ?
  • i.e. if you deadlift and had an arching spine, did you know you were arching your spine ?
• Range of motion
  • Can you go through the entire range ?
• Score each one out of 3
  • absolutely terrible (don’t do it) - 1
  • Not bad, minor flaw (not bad but need to be careful) - 2
  • Pretty good (no problems) - 3

Testing for power

• There is no straight forward test for speed but you can infer speed from a power test
• To test, do a simple broad jump forward.
• Stand about shoulder width apart and try to jump as far forward as possible.
• Measure from the front of your feet to the heel of the landing foot/feet.
  • Meaning, take the worst result
  • You can also swing your arms and bounce but no running.
• You should be able to jump your height
  • It's about 15% lower for females

Testing for strength

• You have to measure strength in the movements that you want to get stronger at.
• So, test for an upper body and a lower body movement. But also test your grip strength.
• For any movement that you choose, you want to test your 1 rep max.
• But if you don't want to go to that extreme, pick a weight that you can do <5 reps and enter those numbers in an online calculator to get your 1 rep max.

Testing Grip Strength

• Get a grip dynamometer and you want to be gripping about 40kg,
  • ideally past 60kg
  • 35kg and 50kg for females
• Or/and test your dead hang.
  • minimum of 30s, try to get about 60s.
  • But it doesn’t work very well if you are very heavy

Upper body

• Don't have to test this unless you want to.

Lower body

• A good test is leg extensions.
• You should be able to leg extend your bodyweight
  • men over 40 years should can take that number down 10% every decade.
• Another test is the goblet squat hold
  • Hold 1/2 your body weight for 45s and then stand up.
  • As an introduction, try 1/3 of your body weight.

Other Notes

• Don't test on movements that you are unfamiliar with.
• And with these test, warming up is extremely important.
  • Make sure all your joints are ready to move and you are in a good state to start

Testing for hypertrophy

• Do a DEXA scan,
• look for an FFMI of 20 for males
  • and about 18 for females
• but compare it against your body fat
  • because you can have a high FFMI and high body fat.
  • You want to have <35% for males and <40% for females.

Testing for Endurance

• There are several categories in endurance apart from just how long you can run/walk for.

Muscular Endurance

• Test your push up reps
  • for males, you should be able to get 25+ reps
  • females, 10 reps
  • do this consecutively, so no rest in between
• Or, take your movement in the strength test and use 75% of your 1 rep max weight
  • see how many reps you can do.
  • If you can to 8 reps, that's good
  • If you can do more, means you have a peak strength issue.

Max Anaerobic Capacity

• Pick a cardio machine like a bike/ellipse/treadmill and go for 30-60s
• Mark down the distance you covered and check if you got close to your predicted max heart rate (220-your age)
  • Caveat here: if you went pass it or if you didn't, it doesn't matter as much.
• What you want to see is your heart rate recovery, look for half a beat per second.
  • e.g. after 60s then you should have recovered 30 beats per minute.
  • e.g. if you went up to 200bpm, then you want to see your heart rate at 270bpm after 1 minute

Maximal Heart Rate Test

• ideally you want to do a V02 test
• This is to test how much work you can do at your max heart rate.
• A good test is the 12minutes coopers test, run for 12mins and see how far you can cover.
• You can also do a 1 mile walk test, record your heart rate and distance covered.
  • There is a calculator online for this.

Long Duration Test

• Simple, can you moce at a non-walking pace for 20 minutes and only nasal breathing

source : Guest Series | Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness - Huberman Lab

Testing frequency and routine

• Do this test at least 1x a year

  • but you can do it more frequently, if you wanted to
  • It might be a nice way to end/start the year

• You need a min of 3 days and this is how you should go about testing.

• Start with your body composition scan

  • Try not to do any hard exercises 48 hrs before that

• Then you can do your (on the same day or the next):

  • Movement test
  • Strength/power test
  • and leg endurance test

• Then the next day,

  • Long endurance test
  • Anaerobic test

• the last day

  • Your V02 max test (which is the maximal heart rate test)