While many people want to get in shape, few know what it actually means, or have any way of measuring it. We look at some simple and inexpensive ways of testing your fitness.
If you are about to start a new workout program, it helps to know how fit you are to begin with - that way you can know what progress you have made.
Alternately, if you've been working out for a while, it can still be handy to have a benchmark against which you can measure future progress. The question is, do you know how fit you are in the first place? If not, how can you measure any increase in fitness?
There are a range of different fitness tests you can use - one of the most famous is the bleep test.
The bleep test comprises a series of timed shuttle runs against the clock. There are 23 levels, each a little quicker than the last. Lance Armstrong is allegedly one of the few people to have ever completed all 23 levels.
The bleep test is a good fitness measure for sports people who participate in activities that require frequent short sprints - soccer, tennis, etc.
