How fit are you for your age? Take the test to see how you score and what it means

Regular tests for balance, strength, aerobic fitness, and mobility can help establish if you are keeping up with others in your age range. Check out our six assessments to find out how you score

Keeping tabs on your fitness levels can be motivational and protective of your health

• This article is part of our Best of 2024 collection. It was originally published in March. Find more stories like this here.

Most of us know that good genes, a healthy diet, along with the right type and amount of exercise can leave us in better physical shape than our birth date implies.

Yet there is no denying that ageing takes its toll and that, even with supreme workout diligence, your strength and aerobic capacity at 50 or 60 will likely not be the same as when you were 20 or 30.

What matters more is how fit you are for your age. You’ll find a host of simple online tests to estimate how you measure up against your peers in terms of stamina, mobility, muscular endurance, and strength. Also, keeping tabs on your fitness scores over the years can provide a perspective on where your most significant fitness declines are.

Prof Niall Moyna says keeping tabs on fitness levels can protect your health.

Prof Niall Moyna from the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University, says keeping tabs on your fitness levels can be motivational and protective of your health. “As we age, some physical attributes such as muscle mass and lower body strength, mobility and balance deteriorate,” he says. “They can be a predictor of falls and your susceptibility to frailty and ill health, so it is really important to monitor any massive deterioration.”

Moyna says we should pick a battery of tests and repeat them every six months. Tests for balance, strength, aerobic fitness, and mobility are all important. “You don’t have to do every single test, but a range that will help to assess your age-related fitness is good,” he says. “Repeat the same tests each time and always aim to be in the top 20% for your age category or work towards that statistic.”

At 65 he has the all-round fitness of someone aged 35, he says. “But I want to have the fitness of someone in their 40s when I am in my 70s. So I test myself and keep myself in shape as much as I can.”

Here are six tests to try:

How aerobically fit are you for your age?

As we age, a drop in aerobic capacity and muscle strength means that endurance performance slows

The test: 

Do a parkrun 5km. These free weekly events are held at 9am on Saturdays. Sign up for a barcode at parkrun.ie and walk or run around the route as fast as possible.

What it tells you: 

As we age, a drop in aerobic capacity and muscle strength means that endurance performance slows. Parkun organisers take your time and roughly compare it to the world’s best 5km time for your sex and age to come up with an age-graded percentage score that appears next to your result.

How did you score?

The higher your age-graded score, the better your performance relative to the fastest in the world for your age. It’s a score that levels the playing field and means you can compare performances with family and friends across age ranges.

If you don’t want to do a parkrun you can time yourself over a 5km route and use these times as a guide:

In your 20s and 30s

Men

• Good: Faster than 23 minutes
• Average: 23-27 minutes
• Low: Slower than 28 minutes

Women

• Good: Faster than 26 minutes
• Average: 26-30 minutes
• Low: Slower than 31 minutes

In your 40s and 50s

Men

• Good: Faster than 27 minutes
• Average: 27-31 minutes
• Low: Slower than 31 minutes

Women

• Good: Faster than 29 minutes
• Average: 29-34 minutes
• Low: Slower than 35 minutes

In your 60s

Men

• Good: Faster than 30 minutes
• Average: 30-34 minutes
• Low: Slower than 34 minutes

Women

• Good: Faster than 35 minutes
• Average: 36-40 minutes
• Low: Slower than 41 minutes

In your 70s and older

Men

• Good: Faster than 38 minutes
• Average: 39-45 minutes
• Low: Slower than 46 minutes

Women

• Good: Faster than 45 minutes
• Average: 46-54 minutes
• Low: Slower than 55 minutes

How mobile are you? (20s-60s)

The test: 

Sit on the floor with your legs crossed and get back up without the help of your hands or knees. 

If you can sit down and stand back up without using a hand, forearm, knee, side of a leg or hand on a knee, you score a perfect 10 (five points for sitting, five points for standing). If you use any of these for support, subtract one point each time.

Subtract a half-point if you were wobbly sitting or standing. Do the test twice to obtain an average of your best scores. If you find this too hard, start with the alternative mobility test below.

What it tells you: 

This rising sit-to-stand test is considered a measure of functional mobility and musculoskeletal fitness and is used to predict mortality risk in middle-aged and older people. 

A study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology involving 2,002 adults in their 50s and older showed that those with the lowest score of 0-3 points in the rising-sit test were five to six times more likely to die prematurely than those who scored 8-10 points.

How did you score?

• Good: 8-10 points
• Average: 4-7 points
• Low: 0-3 points

How mobile are you? (60s and older)

The test: 

Sit upright in the middle of a hard-backed dining chair, arms folded across the chest and feet flat on the floor shoulder-width apart. Raise yourself to a full standing position, knees straight, before sitting down fully again. Don’t cheat — half standing or sitting and using your hands doesn’t count. Complete as many full stands followed by full sits as you can in 30 seconds.

What it tells you: 

A measure of functional mobility in older people but also for people of any age who spend much of their day sitting.

How did you score?

Researchers at the University of Oslo published the following guideline average scores:

• 60-70 years – 21 (women), 24 (men)
• 70-79 years – 17 (women), 19 (men)
• 80+ years – 14 (women), 17 (men)

How good is your stamina?

How long does it take you to run or walk one mile?

The test: 

Using a treadmill, running track or a measuring device such as a GPS tracker, time how long it takes you to run or walk one mile. “If you are older you can measure the distance between chairs or markers and see how far you can walk in six minutes or a given time,” Moyna says. “There are standardised score results available online.”

What it tells you: 

Stamina is a measure of your physical and mental ability to sustain prolonged effort at close to your maximum capacity. “Our stamina tends to decline along with our muscle mass as we age but it is so important for cardiovascular and general health,” Moyna says.

How did you score?

In your 20s and 30s

Walking

• Good: 12-14 minutes
• Average: 15-16 minutes
• Low: Slower than 16 minutes

Running

• Good: 7-10 minutes
• Average: 11-12 minutes
• Low: Slower than 12 minutes

In your 40s and 50s

Walking

• Good: 14-15 minutes
• Average: 16-17 minutes
• Low: Slower than 17 minutes

Running

• Good: 8-11 minutes
• Average: 12-13
• Low: Slower than 14 minutes

In your 60s and older

Walking

• Good: 15-16 minutes
• Average: 17-18 minutes
• Low: Slower than 18 minutes

Running

• Good: 10-13 minutes
• Average: 14-15 minutes
• Low: Slower than 15 minutes

How healthy are your upper body muscles?

Declining grip power and strength is a red flag warning

The test: 

The dead hang tests your grip power and requires you to engage muscles in the arms, abs, back, and shoulders. You can do it on a bar at a park or playground, at a gym, or on a bar attached to a door frame. The idea is to hold on to the bar for as long as you can.

What it tells you: 

Declining grip power and strength is a red flag warning for deteriorating health and the dead hang is a way of measuring it if you don’t have access to a hand-held dynamometer machine at the gym. Researchers from the University of Michigan reported that muscle weakness, as measured by poor grip strength, is associated with accelerated biological ageing.

Doing the dead hang exercise regularly will also strengthen the muscles needed to improve your score, so it’s a double bonus.

How did you score?

In your 20s and 30s

• Target: 60-90 seconds

In your 40s and 50s

• Target: 20-45 seconds

In your 60s and 70s

• Target: 10-15 seconds

How well can you balance?

The test:

“Timing how long you can stand on one leg without wobbling is an excellent test of how well you can balance,” Moyna says. “Do it with your eyes open and near a wall should you need support. Then, progress to doing it with your eyes closed.”

What it tells you: 

Balance nosedives from our 50s onwards and with the decline, the risk for falls and fractures rises. Results of a 12-year study involving 1,702 people aged between 51 and 75 showed that an inability to stand unsupported on one leg with eyes open for 10 seconds was associated with an 84% raised risk of death from any cause.

How did you score?

In your 20s and 30s

• Good: 60+ seconds
• Average: 35-59 seconds
• Low: Below 35 seconds

In your 40s and 50s

• Good:45+ seconds
• Average: 25-44 seconds
• Low: Below 25 seconds

In your 60s and older

• Good: 30 seconds +
• Average: 15-29 seconds
• Low: Below 15 seconds

Calculate your score

If you are in good physical shape for your age it means that your body could be biologically younger than your birth (or chronological) age suggests. 

Norwegian scientists have long researched how fitness affects the ageing process and our susceptibility to age-related diseases and their findings, published in journals such as Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise, have enabled them to come up with a calculator using an algorithm that predicts your fitness age. 

Studies have also shown that the lower your fitness age according to this algorithm, the lower your risk of heart attacks, brain shrinkage and depression. You can use the calculator to find out your score here: hvemereldst.no/en

This article was first published on March 22, 2024