Fitness Testing

If you decide on taking up running or some other form of exercise for whatever reason it's always a good idea to carry out some form of test to determine your current level of fitness and retesting to monitor your progress.  If the results improve you know what you are doing is working and if they show no improvements you know that some adjustments are needed.

What is a fitness test? This can be something as simple as timing yourself over a measured course, noting the results and re doing the exact same procedure after 3 to 4 weeks of regular exercise.

If you are training a bit more seriously you could follow a standardised test such as the Cooper Test.  The person doing this test runs at a steady pace which should be as fast as they can comfortably manage for 12 minutes and the distance they covered is recorded and compare with a set of results related to their age group.  Today we carried out this test on Tony during our usual Saturday Morning session on the Grass Track.  Over the 12 minutes Tony covered 3130 M which according to the results he's at the top end of the scale for Athletes which makes me think he should be graded using the experienced athletes chart and this puts him in just inside the average range.  Only average?? Using the experienced athletes chart a person that can comfortably run a 6 min mile for 2 miles is average.

Another simple way of testing your training progress is to take part in a fun run and compare this time with future races.  Check out the Leixlip 5K on Saturday May 09th 2009.