Fitness Testing Overview

Purpose of Health Screening & Fitness Assessment

• Screens
  • Identifies individuals at risk
  • Documents known and unknown disabilities and impairments
  • Therapy or medical referral may be provided for treatable conditions
• Assesses
  • Identifies need for specific exercise prescription
  • Detects strengths and weaknesses
• Predicts
  • Identifies expected outcomes
  • Set goals
• Monitors
  • Checks efficacy of program
  • Initial testing establishes a baseline for future testing
  • Changes to program can be made based in part from the results of future testing

General Procedures

• Pretesting
  • ACSM Risk Classification Form or Exercise Readiness Questionnaire
    • Vitals: HR & BP
    • Medical Clearance Form
  • Lifestyle and Medical Questionnaire
  • Informed Consent
• Choose appropriate fitness test
  • Consider availability of equipment, testing environment, goals of assessment, age and physical limitations of subject
  • Note tests validity, reliability, sensitivity, acceptability, and practicality
  • Norms should be derived from population similar to subject
• Test and retest conditions should be similar
  • Time of day, equipment, fatigue, motivation, etc
  • Same tester (particularly for skinfold and circumferences tests where inter-tester reliability is high)
• Delivery of test instructions
• Appropriate warm-ups & cooldowns
  • Stretching before strength and power assessment may decrease performance for up to one hour (Evetovich 2003, Young 2003) and may not decrease occurrence of injury (See Stretching and Flexibility)
• Follow logical order of fitness tests to decrease fatigue's effect on test performance
• Terminate test if indications are observed

Also see Procedures for the Administration of a Graded Exercise Test and YMCA fitness Tests

Causes of Fitness Testing Error

• Subject
  • Motivation, Fatigue
  • Bodyweight variations other than body composition from test to retest:
    • Varied hydration and ingested food
      • different time of day or altered diet
      • exercising or physical activity before test
    • Different clothes worn
• Technician
  • Experience with technique
  • Lack of standardization
  • Encouragement given to subject
  • Tester bias
• Equipment
  • Calibration
  • Appropriate fit to subject
• Environment
  • Room temperature (indoor), weather (outdoor), time of day, distractions

Clinical Exercise Tests

• Death rate for clinical exercise lab test ~1 / 20,000 tests
  • ~1 / 50,000 risk of dying during exercise
• Always have emergency drugs and equipment available
• A physician may need to be present for higher risk individuals