Nine fitness tests you can run on yourself, with numbers

Most people gauge their fitness by how they look or how a workout felt, without ever checking whether a specific weak point is quietly limiting everything else. On Huberman Lab Essentials, Dr. Andy Galpin lays out nine distinct physiological adaptations that make up physical fitness, along with a simple, mostly free test and target number for each one.

Movement skill comes first

Before testing anything else, Galpin checks four things in an upper body press, an upper body pull, a squat and a deadlift, filmed from the front and the side: symmetry between left and right, stability under a slow three-to-ten-second pause, awareness of basic cues like keeping heels down in a squat, and full range of motion at each joint. A simple 0-to-3 score flags anything that puts a joint at real risk before loading it heavily.

Power, strength and grip have concrete targets

Power gets tested with a standing broad jump: a healthy target is jumping your own height, about 15% less for women. Grip strength, measured with a hand-dynamometer that costs roughly $25, should sit above 40 kg for men and 35 kg for women, with less than a 10% difference between hands; a dead hang from a pull-up bar should last at least 30 seconds, with 60 seconds a strong result. For leg strength, a leg extension loaded to bodyweight is the benchmark, dropping about 10% per decade after age 40; a front or goblet squat hold with half your bodyweight for 45 seconds at the bottom position works nearly as well and adds a core-stability check.

Muscle mass has its own health floor

Hypertrophy isn't just about looks. Using a DEXA scan or another body-composition method, Galpin looks at fat-free mass index, or FFMI, which combines weight, height and body fat percentage. He wants to see 20 or higher for men and 18 or higher for women, assuming body fat stays under roughly 30% for men and 35% for women. Dropping under 17 for men or 15 for women signals a real physiological problem, not just an aesthetic preference.

Endurance splits into four separate tests

Muscular endurance is checked with a 60-second front plank, a 45-second side plank, and consecutive push-ups: 25 or more for men, 15 or more for women. Loading a strength test to 75% of the one-rep max and counting reps works too, with fewer than eight reps flagging a gap. Anaerobic capacity, the ability to sustain near-maximal effort for 30 to 60 seconds, can be estimated without a lab by tracking heart rate recovery: after reaching exhaustion, a healthy response drops roughly half a beat per second, meaning about 30 beats per minute in the first minute and half that in each following minute. Maximum aerobic capacity, or VO2 max, has a minimum bar of 35 ml/kg/min for men and 30 for women, with a genuinely fit target above 50, and elite closer to 55; a 12-minute Cooper run test or a one-mile walk test with heart rate at the end can estimate it without lab equipment. The last adaptation, long-duration endurance, just means sustaining 20 to 30 minutes of non-walking movement without a break, ideally breathing only through the nose.

Speed and estimating a one-rep max without maxing out

Galpin doesn't think most people need to test pure speed at all, unless they're a competitive athlete who benefits from a timed sprint or a barbell velocity reading. Strength testing also doesn't require grinding out a true one-rep max: loading a weight close to your limit, doing up to five reps, and plugging that number into any online one-rep-max calculator gives a reasonably accurate estimate. Push past five reps and the estimate gets progressively less reliable, so the advice is to stay under that rep count rather than chase a bigger set for a "more impressive" number. In a lab, anaerobic capacity gets measured with a 30-second Wingate test or a 60-second Bosco vertical-jump protocol on a force plate, but a hard 30-to-60-second effort on a bike, rower or sprint works as a practical substitute, since the exact protocol matters less than pushing to genuine exhaustion and then tracking the heart rate recovery described above.

Running the full battery

Galpin recommends testing all nine adaptations once a year, spread across roughly three days. Non-fatiguing measurements like body composition and movement screening go first, ideally 48 hours after the last hard workout so inflammation and water retention don't skew the numbers. Power and strength testing come next since they need to happen while fresh, and muscular endurance testing can follow immediately after on the same joint or muscle group. Anaerobic capacity and VO2 max testing are demanding enough to deserve their own separate days.

The takeaway

None of these nine numbers require a lab, a coach or expensive equipment, just a dynamometer, a pull-up bar, a stopwatch and a bit of planning. The point isn't to optimize every category at once; it's to find whichever adaptation sits low enough to act as a hidden ceiling on everything else, whether that's grip strength, VO2 max or basic movement quality, and bring that one specific weak point up to a level where it stops holding the rest of your fitness back.