When it comes to building a fitness habit, most people just want to feel better, lose a bit of weight, or boost their energy. But even if you’re training for general health, assessing your fitness along the way is a necessary process to keep you motivated and progressing. It can also be encouraging at times where you feel you've really stagnated. Maybe you're just in a rough patch mentally but the numbers you are tracking still show some kind of progression, or if you are keeping a training journal you can look and see your reflections on recent sessions to help reframe.
Think of fitness assessment like having a road map. Without it, you might still be moving, but you won’t know how far you’ve come or where you’re headed.
In this article, we’ll walk through a few simple assessments you can do at home or in the gym to track your progress across all major areas of fitness: body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and endurance, and flexibility. While the assessments we chose for this article aren't all necessarily all the gold standard, they are good enough to help you track trends with minimal equipment and that's what is important when you are first starting out.
Let’s start with the basics: body weight and body fat percentage.
Most people already have a bathroom scale, but if you're shopping for one, we recommend finding one with bioelectrical impedance built in. This feature uses a mild electrical current to estimate your body fat percentage. Don't worry about the current either! It's subsensory, meaning you can't feel it. Bioelectrical impedance is not as precise as skinfold calipers or DEXA scans, but for home use, it’s great for identifying trends over time.
Pro tip: Don’t obsess over the numbers. Your weight can fluctuate daily due to hydration, food intake, or even the time of day. To get the most reliable reading:
Remember: you're looking for trends, not day-to-day fluctuations. Think of fluctuations as noise that muddies up your data. Slightly less frequent measures like weekly or bi-weekly are more likely to give you better data over time assuming the measures are taken under similar conditions. It protects your mental health too from obsessing about over weight that naturally fluctuates on a daily basis. That is a super easy trap to fall into and it opens the way for disordered eating and body image issues.
Cardiovascular fitness is one of the most important indicators of overall health and a major predictor of longevity. You don’t need a fancy lab test to get a rough estimate of your VO2 max (your body’s ability to use oxygen during exercise). You just need a little space and a timer. While our course has a more detailed breakdown, you can still try these now and make use of our calculators.
Two simple tests we recommend:
These tests estimate your cardiovascular endurance and can be repeated every four weeks on average to track progress. Beginners tend to see fast improvements, which makes this especially encouraging early on but do be aware that rate of progress slows down as you become more fit. This is perfectly normal and it is not a sign that you are not doing enough or somehow failing in your training.
You can also track your heart rate recovery—how quickly your heart returns to normal after exercise. The faster it recovers, the better your cardiovascular fitness.
Muscular strength and endurance are often not emphasized heavily outside of athletic training or someone already in the gym as a hobby, but they’re critical parameters for healthy aging and reducing your risk of injury and chronic disease. Muscle mass is also important for overall health and longevity, but like strength and endurance it may not be emphasized as much as it should be. Many people dismiss muscle mass because they are not interested in looking bulky or they don't want to be vain but there are very important reasons to maintain your muscle mass as well. Research shows that muscle mass is linked to better insulin sensitivity (which helps prevent type 2 diabetes), reduced fall risk, and improved longevity.
One of the most common markers used in more recent longevity studies is grip strength, not because grip itself is directly related to living longer, but because it acts as a proxy of your overall muscular fitness. For the general population, it's best to think of your strength in the gym in a similar way. For example, you probably don't need the level of strength necessary to place at a local powerlifting meet but you should have a basic baseline of muscular strength to maintain normal activities of daily living. In this context, your strength measured in different exercises serves a proxy of your general muscular fitness in similar way as grip strength.
The safest way to assess muscular strength is through a submaximal repetition test. Here’s how:
This method is ideal for tracking your strength in a less stressful way than with a true maximal lift. Remember, even though it is less challenging, it is still challenging and that does carry some level of risk, but that is true of all exercise and it will be lower than a traditional one repetition max test. We recommend holding off on a true one repetition max until you have a baseline level of proficiency with an exercise and a way to do it safely with the proper equipment (power rack with spot bars) and a spotter. Practice helps build proficiency in different exercises just like any other practiced skill, but if you have always trained alone you may want to ask for help from a trainer at your gym.
While not as direct of a measure of strength, muscular endurance serves as another proxy of muscular health in a similar way as the grip test does. Try some muscular endurance assessments instead of a submaximal test, especially if you are exercising at home with limited equipment:
Similar to the cardiovascular fitness, get your our baseline when you start an exercise plan and reassess every 4–6 weeks. Remember to record your results too. Don't just do the assessment once and forget about it.
General levels of flexibility can be useful in predicting areas that may become painful in the future. For example, if you have really tight hamstrings, you may end up with low back pain assuming it's related to the hamstrings and not a nerve getting impinged somewhere. Also, if you have really tight chest muscles and shoulders, you may start seeing more neck pain creep in.
You don’t need to be able to touch your toes to be considered “flexible,” but some self-checks are helpful—especially if you’re dealing with tight areas like we mentnioed.
A few ideas:
Want help improving your squat or mobility? Upload a video to or picture to ChatGPT and it can help identify potentially tight muscles and recommend stretches and specific exercises to help you loosen up.
It should also be mentioned that stretching is going to be most useful in beginners, but one of the easiest way to improve flexibility is to perform all of your resistance training exercises with a full range of motion.
Fitness assessments are very useful tools. They help you answer the question: Is what I’m doing actually working? They also serve as another way to gauge progress other than the scale, which may be encouraging when weight loss slows down or temporarily stalls (which it will).
With a few simple tests and consistency, you’ll not only see your progress more clearly, you’ll feel more motivated to keep going.
