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

Stand with normal position, jump out as far in front of you as you possibly can, and measure the distance between where you started and the back of your heel where it lands. A super per basic number to look for there is your height. So, you should be able to broad jump how tall you are.

Certainly, somebody in their 40s to 50s should be able to leg extension their body weight.

I want you to get up to a maximum heart rate, and then test your heart rate recovery. And what you should be looking for there is about half a beat recovery per second ... Within 60 seconds, you should—again, at half a beat per second—you should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute.

If your resting heart rate is 75 beats per minute, there's either something going on or you're not fit.

That's going to actually tell you if you have sufficient muscle mass ... If you're a man, your FFMI [Fat-Free Mass Index] should be something like 20 or higher. If you're a woman, you want to look for something like 18.

A standard plank is a good testament of muscular endurance. So, can you hold a front plank for 60 seconds? Can you hold a side plank for 45 seconds?

The other way to assess muscular endurance is take the exact strength test you did... Load that to 75%, and then do that for as many repetitions as you can, and that is a tremendous barometer of muscular endurance ... You want to look for more than eight repetitions.

For a general male, we should have no problem doing 25 plus consecutive push-ups.

The metrics for VO2 max... For men, a minimum number we want to look at here is 35 mL per kg per minute; and for women, that'd be about 30.

Strength, truly, is a marker of... what's the maximum thing you can move or what's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time. It's not how many repetitions in a row you can do—that's actually another one of our annotations called muscular endurance.

You need a combination of some sort of broad strength training and broad endurance ... If you want to maximize health and overall functionality throughout time, it needs to be a combination.

There's generally two types of muscle fibers: fast-twitch and slow-twitch. One of the things that is a hallmark of aging is a reflective reduction in fast-twitch fibers.