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You can perform some very simple fitness tests at home to know your fitness level. When most people think about fitness, they think about how fast they can run, how long they can exercise, or how much weight they can lift. But fitness is bigger than that.
Your ability to stand up from a chair, walk steadily, balance on one leg for 15 seconds, climb stairs, or repeatedly get up and sit down can tell you a great deal about how well your body is functioning.
These movements may look simple. Yet they require several parts of the body to work together. Your muscles, joints, nerves, balance system, heart and lungs, coordination, and reaction time. That is why physical performance can be such a useful indicator of health, particularly as we grow older.
Your Body Must Work As A Team
Consider something as ordinary as getting out of a chair. Your leg muscles must generate enough force to lift your body. Your joints need enough movement to allow you to stand. Your nervous system must coordinate the movement. Your balance system must keep you upright. Your heart and lungs must provide enough oxygen to support the effort.
If one or more of these systems weakens, as in congestive heart failure, movement can become slower, more difficult, or less stable. This is what makes simple movement tests useful. They do not measure just one part of the body. They give us a picture of how several systems work together.
Balance Is More Important Than Many People Realize
Being able to stand on one leg for many seconds is one of the fitness tests at home that may seem like a party trick, but balance is an important part of physical fitness. Good balance requires your brain, eyes, inner ear, muscles, joints and nerves to communicate with one another, always.
Your body must detect where it is in space and make rapid adjustments to prevent you from falling. Poor balance therefore does not simply mean that someone is “not athletic.” It may reflect reduced physical capacity related to an underlying health problem such as obesity.
A simple 10-second one-leg stand can provide a useful snapshot of your balance. However, struggling with the test should not be interpreted as a diagnosis or a prediction of how long you will live. Not being able to do this should be seen as a caution to pay more attention to physical function.
Strength
A fitness test at home such as the ability to stand up from a chair repeatedly for 10 cycles is a practical way of assessing lower-body strength and endurance.
Think about the everyday life activities in Ghana: getting up from a low chair, climbing stairs, getting on and off a trotro, carrying groceries, squatting down and standing back up, or getting up from the floor.
These activities become increasingly difficult when the muscles of the legs and hips lose mass and strength. This is why resistance exercise, adequate protein intake, and other forms of strength training are part of fitness.
Walking Speed and Agility
Walking quickly, changing direction and remaining stable while doing so requires more than strong legs. You need coordination, balance, reaction time, joint mobility and enough cardiovascular capacity to support these movements.
A person may therefore have a reasonable level of cardiovascular fitness but still have poor balance or inadequate lower-body strength. No single exercise can develop every component of physical fitness equally well.
Fitness Means A Lot More Than Cardiovascular Exercise
For years, people have often treated fitness as if it mainly means having a strong heart and lungs. Cardiovascular-pulmonary fitness is certainly important. Activities such as brisk walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, and dancing can improve your ability to sustain physical activity.
But your body also needs:
- To build adequate muscle mass
- Muscle strength
- Muscular endurance
- Balance
- Coordination
- Flexibility and mobility
- Agility
- Cardiovascular endurance
These abilities work together. Someone who walks for 30 minutes every day may have good cardiovascular fitness but still have weak leg muscles. Another person may have strong muscles but poor cardiovascular endurance. Someone else may be reasonably strong and fit but have poor balance. A well-rounded fitness program therefore needs more than one type of exercise.
Do You Need A Gym?
One of the most useful things about functional fitness is that many fitness tests at home and exercises require very little equipment.
You can practise standing up and sitting down from a sturdy chair as fast as you can, and as many times as possible for as many cycles as you can. You can do controlled squats or step-ups, practise standing on one leg for 15 seconds near a stable support, walk briskly, climb stairs and perform resistance exercises using your body weight or appropriate weights.
Being able to get out of a chair, walk to the bathroom, climb stairs or carry everyday items is not merely about fitness. It is about you living your life without unnecessary dependence on someone else. You don’t need a gym in order to perform these fitness assessments on yourself.
Simple Fitness Checks
You can think about your physical capacity by asking yourself a few basic questions:
Can I stand up from a chair without pushing myself up with my arms? walk briskly without becoming unusually breathless or unstable? climb a flight of stairs safely? Can I stand on one leg for at least 10 seconds without immediately losing my balance? Or repeatedly stand up and sit down without becoming excessively fatigued?
If these activities have become noticeably more difficult than they used to be, it may be a warning sign your health is getting worse. Changes in functional capability can have many causes, including sedentary lifestyle, excessive body weight, reduced muscle mass and strength, joint problems, neurological problems, cardiovascular disease, respiratory problems and other health conditions.
What We Have Learnt
Your fitness is not simply how much exercise you can tolerate. It is also how effectively your body can perform the movements required for everyday life. Measures of physical performance—such as walking ability, chair-stand performance, balance and functional mobility—are strongly associated with health outcomes, particularly with age.
But there is an important distinction: these tests identify physical capacity; they do not guarantee that improving a particular test score will automatically make you live longer.
What they can do is give you useful information–To inform you that your health is deteriorating. If your strength, balance, mobility, or endurance is declining, that is something worth paying attention to, right? You don’t have to wait until you become frail or struggle with everyday activities before you start training these abilities.
Build strength. Practice balance. Walk regularly. Maintain your mobility. Challenge your cardiovascular system appropriately. It is about keeping your body capable of doing the activities of daily living. Perform these fitness tests at home on yourself. But be careful not to get hurt while performing these simple fitness checks.