Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin

“You can do an upper body strength test if you would like, although it's not technically something we do very often. One I'm generally more interested in is a leg extension test. And the reason I like this is a back squat is better. A barbell back squad is, look, that's my, like, that's my jam. That's my life, right? It's just very technically demanding.”

“And it's challenging. You need spotters. You need comfort. A lot goes into this. So for the average person, a leg extension test is fairly standardized. You don't have to worry about technique and people can just get into it and go. And so what you want to look for there is a couple of standards you want to hit.”

“It's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load, as well as core strength and low back stability. It's more difficult than leg extension, but it's quite a bit more functional and it's going to give you insight into a lot more areas than just the quadriceps. So 45 seconds down at the bottom of the squat and then returning to a standing position.”

“So, adjust these accordingly. If you're not comfortable with the front squat, do the leg extension. If you're not even comfortable with that, do something different. So, we never want to utilize maximum testing if it's going to come with a consequence of serious acute injury.”

“And that is a tremendous barometer of muscular endurance. So if you were able to do 200 pounds on your leg extension test, put 75% on that and do that as many reps as you can. You want to look for more than eight repetitions. If you are below eight repetitions, then we have a muscular endurance problem.”

“So, this is a very common strategy we use. We do our one rep max leg extension, five minutes, seven minutes, whatever we need to do, come back, load it to 75%, do as many reps as you can. Boom. You could roll right into then your upper body test or your grip strength test or anything else that you want to do there.”

“You need to measure this in multiple areas. And we'll start off with grip strength. You can do this in two ways. You can buy a hand grip dynamometer. Now, these are anywhere between $20 to $100 anywhere. These actually used to be, like when I was in school, like hundreds of dollars. And now you can literally buy them on any website for $25.”

“for movement precision and writing, things like that. If you are a male and you're under 40 kilograms on a hand grip dynamometer, we're going to need to train that. If you're a female, it's not that much lower, but about 35 kilograms is the cutoff point.”

“seconds. If you don't have allowed access to a laboratory, you can do this on any protocol you want. This could be sprinting. This can be on an air bike. This could be on a rower, anything like that. Anything where you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do things like a kettlebell swing or something like that.”

“squat hold. So you're going to hold a weight in front of your chest, whether a kettlebell is great here, a dumbbell is fine here. And you want to hold about half of your body weight, go all the way to the bottom position and try to hold that for about 45 seconds.”

“And you're going to stand on a force plate and you're going to do as many vertical jumps as fast as you can, as high as you can for 60 seconds, and you are absolutely destroyed by like second 45. So, we either use that Wingate protocol or that BOSCO protocol.”

“In fact, there is a one-mile walk test you can do. In this case, you have to have some sort of either a stopwatch or ideally a heart rate monitor. And all you have to do is use a rock pour one mile submaximal test. So you're going to walk a mile, record the time, record your heart rate at the end, enter those in, and those will give you, again, estimates of your VO2 max.”

“squat hold. So you're going to hold a weight in front of your chest, whether a kettlebell is great here, a dumbbell is fine here. And you want to hold about half of your body weight, go all the way to the bottom position and try to hold that for about 45 seconds.”

“it. Something like going to the gym and jumping on any pull-up bar or pull-up rack. In general, we should be able to hang for a minimum of 30 seconds is what we're looking for.”

“This could be sprinting. This can be on an air bike. This could be on a rower, anything like that. Anything where you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do things like a kettlebell swing or something like that.”

“minute if you want. It doesn't really matter. We don't really have standards for these things because it's going to be different. How far you can travel in 30 seconds on a treadmill is just going to be so different than sprinting in the field or on the assault bike or whatever. So, what you really want to worry about there is: can you complete it?”