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Assess Your Cardiovascular Endurance

© Mindy Herzog

To determine your physical fitness level, ability to start a training program, or a means to evaluate your progress, you may want to seek out a health professional to give you an assessment or try some assessment techniques that you can perform at home. Keep in mind that every skills test is individual and everyone will respond differently.

Always speak to your physician before starting any fitness program.

The many values that are determined in a fitness assessment are your cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, muscular strength, muscular endurance, and body fat composition.

This first article, in a series of articles on assessing your fitness ability at home, will focus on cardiovascular endurance. Cardiovascular endurance trains the ability of your heart, blood vessels, and lungs to deliver nutrients and oxygen to your tissues and to remove wastes. Efficient functioning of the heart and lungs is required for optimal enjoyment of such activities such as walking, running, swimming, cycling, and hiking.

The BEST exercise is ANY exercise that utilizes the large muscle groups, is rhythmic and aerobic in nature, and lasts for a suspended period of time, like 15 minutes or more.

For a home evaluation of cardiovascular endurance we are going to use the Rockport 1-mile walk. So first off, you’ll need to figure out a safe, 1-mile stretch of area, that you can walk for 1-mile. You can also check out your closest track that may belong to a high school or university or use a treadmill. You will want to cover the 1-mile walk as quick and comfortable as possible.

Don’t be scared by the calculation, just write it down and fill in the spaces. To determine your predicted VO2max for the Rockport Walking Test (1-mile walk) use the following equation.

VO2max (ml/kg/min) = 132.853 – 0.1692 (body mass in kg) – 0.3877 (age in years) + 6.315 (gender) – 3.2649 (time in minutes) – 0.1565 (heart rate)

You can print out this article and plug in your numbers for this calculation.

VO2max (ml/kg/min) = 132.853 – 0.1692 (_________kg) – 0.3877 (_______years) + 6.315 (______gender) – 3.2649 (___________minutes) – 0.1565 (___________heart rate)

1. To convert body weight in pounds to kg, divide by 2.2. So for a weight of 160 pounds, divided by 2.2 you would be 72.7 kg.

2. Age in Years is just your age.

3. For gender, females put 0 and males put 1.

4. You take your heart rate at the end of your walk. You may take it for 30 seconds and multiply by 2 or take it for a full minute. You will need to use the number of beats for a full minute.

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