How to test your own fitness at home: ten field tests, what you need, and which have real norms

The field tests worth doing are the ones with evidence behind the thing they measure. Aerobic capacity is one of the strongest predictors of survival on record: in 122,007 patients tested on a treadmill, the fittest had about one fifth the risk of death of the least fit (Mandsager 2018). Strength, measured as grip, went with about 16% higher mortality for each 5 kg lower across 17 countries (Leong 2015).

Stability has its own evidence. Adults aged 51–75 who could not stand on one leg for 10 seconds had 1.84 times the mortality of those who could (Araujo 2022); the lowest scores on the floor sit-and-rise went with about five times the mortality of the highest (Brito 2012); and across pooled cohorts, the slowest quarter on chair rises had about twice the mortality of the fastest (Cooper 2010).

All of this is observational. It shows that people who can do these things live longer, not that passing a test adds years. It is still the best guide there is to what a home battery should cover.

• [Single-leg stand](/tests/single-leg-stand), eyes closed, arms crossed, best of three. A wall within reach. Norms: a table of 549 adults aged 18–99 (Springer 2007).
• [Five sit-to-stands](/tests/sit-to-stand) from a 45 cm chair, arms crossed, timed. Norms from 60: slower than 11.4 s in the 60s, 12.6 s in the 70s or 14.8 s in the 80s is worse than average (Bohannon 2006). Under 60, a trend only.
• [Floor sit-and-rise](/tests/sit-and-rise), scored out of 10. Clear floor, bare feet. Mortality bands exist; the age bands are estimates.
• [Grip strength](/tests/grip-strength), best of three. A hand dynamometer. Norms: British centiles from 49,964 people (Dodds 2014).
• [Dead hang](/tests/dead-hang), max hold. A pull-up bar. No published adult norms exist (our search); coaching bands only.
• [Push-ups](/tests/push-ups), strict, max reps. Floor space. Category tables, read as fifths.
• [Farmer carry](/tests/farmer-carry), distance at a fixed load. Two weights and 20 m of floor. No norm; a trend.
• [VO₂max](/tests/vo2max) from a watch, a 12-minute run or a one-mile walk. Norms from measured tests (FRIEND 2015).
• [Zone 2 minutes](/tests/zone-2) a week. A watch or your own log. Not a percentile: a share of the 150-minute guideline.
• [Stair test](/tests/stair-test), four flights, timed. Stairs. One clinical study: 46 s on average with high treadmill fitness, 82 s with low (Peteiro 2021).

Six tests have a published table for your age and sex. Four do not, and any app or article that gives you a percentile for a dead hang or a farmer carry has invented it.

A home test is only as good as its repeatability. The variables that move a result are small and specific.

The grip device. Electronic dynamometers read about 4–5 kg higher than the hydraulic Jamar or the Smedley spring device (Lessof 2023), which is as much as a decade of normal decline. Use the same device every quarter and note which chart it matches.

Eyes open or closed. The 10-second one-leg study was eyes open (Araujo 2022); the Springer table is eyes closed and much harder (Springer 2007). A result from one cannot be read against the other.

The chair. The sit-to-stand reference times assume a standard chair; a low sofa or a high stool changes the time more than a year of ageing does (Bohannon 2006).

Heart rate zones. If you count zone 2 by heart rate, 220 − age is the wrong maximum; 208 − 0.7 × age fits measured data better (Tanaka 2001), and even that has a wide spread between people.

A percentile answers “how do I compare with people my age”. That is useful and limited, because the people your age are, on average, declining. The question that decides what to train is different: what do you need to be able to do today to still do a specific thing at 85?

That is the centenarian decathlon idea: list what you want to do at the end of life and work backwards (Attia 2019). Some of the targets have a published anchor. The aerobic capacity needed for independent living at 85 was estimated at about 18 mL/kg/min for men and 15 for women (Paterson 1999). Others are judgment, and should be labelled as such.

One capacity worth adding that no home battery includes is walking speed: in adults over 65, each 0.1 m/s faster went with 12% lower mortality (Studenski 2011). A measured 10 m walk needs only a tape and a stopwatch.

Longstanding runs this battery as a quarterly session, reads each result against the tables above, and draws the line to 85 for the goals you choose. The calculator does the percentile part in the browser for seven of the tests.