Andy Galpin's 9 Fitness Benchmarks to Self-Test

Most people who say they're "in shape" are answering a question nobody asked. Shape is not a fact about a body; it's a bundle of separate abilities that happen to share a gym. You can deadlift a house and still gas out after ninety seconds of sprinting. You can run a marathon and lose an arm-wrestle to your teenager. Exercise physiologist Andy Galpin, in conversation with Stanford neuroscientist and podcast host Andrew Huberman, spends this episode arguing that fitness only becomes useful as an idea once you break it into pieces small enough to test. He counts nine of them (02:32).

The list runs from skill and speed through power, strength, hypertrophy (muscle size), muscular endurance, anaerobic capacity, maximal aerobic capacity (VO2 max, the peak rate at which the body can use oxygen), and finally long-duration steady-state work. Galpin's point is not academic. Each adaptation fails independently, and each failure has its own downstream cost. Grip strength, for instance, can be tested with a hand dynamometer that now costs as little as $25, which is why Galpin considers it essentially a cost-free tool for tracking one of these adaptations.

What makes the framework worth sitting with is that Galpin refuses to let any single adaptation stand in for the whole. A pushup test, he notes, mostly measures the triceps, chest, and shoulders doing repeated submaximal work, not the heart, not the legs, not the nervous system's ability to fire a single maximal effort.

"A pushup test is really how many reps that your triceps and pecs and deltoids can do. It is not a cardiovascular endurance. It is not a global physiological endurance." — Andy Galpin [03:35]

That distinction, between local muscular endurance and whole-body capacity, is the quiet organizing logic of the whole conversation. Strength is how much force you can produce once. Muscular endurance is how many times you can produce a smaller amount. Anaerobic capacity is how much total work you can do in thirty to a hundred and twenty seconds before the whole system, not just one muscle group, gives out. Aerobic capacity is the same question stretched to eight or fifteen minutes. Long duration is the same question again, stretched past twenty minutes with no breaks. Nine adaptations turn out to be four or five underlying questions, asked at different intensities and durations.

The tests that require no lab

Galpin's first assessment has nothing to do with strength or cardio. It's movement quality, checked joint by joint at the shoulder, elbow, low back, hip, knee, and ankle, using whatever exercise a person already does: a bench press, a pull-up, a squat, a deadlift. Filmed from the front and the side, three to ten slow repetitions, he scores each joint on four things.

"You want to look for four key things. Number one is you want to look for symmetry... Number two, you want to look for stability... The third one is what I call awareness..." — Andy Galpin [08:30]

Symmetry, stability, awareness, and range of motion, scored zero (stop, injury risk), one (proceed cautiously), or three (fine to load), catch problems before they become injuries rather than after (10:44).

Power comes next, and Galpin's version needs no equipment beyond a tape measure. Stand still, swing the arms, jump forward as far as possible, and measure from the start line to the back heel on landing. The benchmark is almost insultingly simple: a person should be able to broad jump a distance equal to their own height, with the standard set about 15% lower for women, who carry less raw power on average (11:52, 12:11). An NFL athlete who is six feet tall will clear nine to eleven feet; Galpin isn't asking for optimization here, only for the absence of a red flag (12:11).

Strength gets tested in two places. Grip strength, measured with a hand dynamometer, should sit at a minimum of 40 kilograms for men and 35 kilograms for women, with no more than 10% difference between hands (13:35, 14:02). A cheaper substitute is the dead hang: hold a pull-up bar with a full grip for a minimum of 30 to 50 seconds, more than 60 if things are going well (14:21). Lower-body strength gets tested with a leg extension machine rather than a barbell squat, because it removes technique as a variable. The target is body weight: if someone weighs 170 pounds, they should be able to leg-extend 170 pounds. After age 40, that number can drop by roughly 10% per decade and still count as healthy (16:45, 17:06). Galpin adds a caveat that matters for anyone trying this at home: one-rep-max estimation formulas, which convert a submaximal set into a projected single-rep max, lose accuracy once the test set goes past five repetitions (17:59). Do three reps at a heavy load, not twelve, if the goal is an honest number.

For people who don't want to touch a leg extension machine at all, Galpin offers a goblet squat hold: hold a kettlebell or dumbbell equal to half your body weight at chest height, drop to the bottom of a squat, and hold for 45 seconds. It doubles as a test of core and low-back stability, since it's hard to fake good position under that kind of sustained load (18:26).

Where muscle size and stamina fit

Hypertrophy, muscle size, is the one adaptation on the list that's partly aesthetic and partly medical, and Galpin is careful to separate the two. How a person wants to look is a personal choice with no scientific verdict attached. But there's a floor beneath which insufficient muscle mass becomes a health liability regardless of appearance, and the way to find that floor is a metric called Fat-Free Mass Index, or FFMI, calculated from body weight, body fat percentage, and height, usually pulled from a DEXA scan or a bioelectrical impedance reading. Galpin sets healthy targets at 20 or higher for men and 18 or higher for women (20:52), with real concern setting in below 17 for men and 15 for women (21:19).

Muscular endurance has a friendlier home test: 25 or more consecutive pushups for men, more than 15 for women, or a 60-second front plank (22:04, 22:30). A more rigorous version reuses the strength number from earlier in the battery: load 75% of whatever was found on the leg extension one-rep max, and see how many reps come out. Fewer than eight signals a real endurance gap (23:14).

Anaerobic capacity, the ability to sustain near-maximal output for thirty seconds to two minutes, is the hardest of the nine to test without a lab, which typically uses a 30-second Wingate test on a stationary bike or a 60-second Bosco protocol of repeated vertical jumps on a force plate (23:36, 24:17). Without that equipment, Galpin's workaround is heart rate recovery rather than the effort itself. Get to a rough estimate of maximum heart rate, calculated as 220 minus age, then time the drop afterward.

"Within 60 seconds, you should have, again, that half a beat per second. You should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute." — Andy Galpin [25:56]

A slower recovery than that points to a weakness in either anaerobic or cardiovascular capacity, which is a more revealing number than the maximum heart rate reading itself, since Galpin says that figure varies so much between individuals that it carries little diagnostic value on its own (25:12).

VO2 max, the most talked-about fitness metric in wellness media right now, gets a plain and almost anticlimactic test here: the Cooper test, run as far as possible in 12 minutes and plug the distance into any standard online calculator (26:35, 26:54). Anyone who can't run gets a gentler version, walking one mile and recording time and heart rate. Galpin's minimum healthy numbers are 35 ml/kg/min for men and 30 ml/kg/min for women, though he'd rather see men above 50 and women above 50 for a real performance margin (34:15, 34:22). The ninth and final adaptation, long-duration steady-state work, has no elaborate test at all: pick any non-walking activity, sustain it for 20 minutes without a break, and, if it's a good day, do it while breathing only through the nose (29:46).

Galpin's closing advice reframes the whole exercise. Run this full battery once a year, ideally over three days, the same way a person gets annual blood work (30:21). The goal is not to be elite in all nine categories. It's to find the one or two areas dragging the rest down, what he calls a "performance anchor," and bring it up to merely adequate. Everything past that is a matter of taste, not obligation.

"I want you to love your training." — Andy Galpin [33:45]

That line lands harder after forty minutes of benchmarks and cutoffs. The measuring isn't the point. It's a way of finding where a body quietly gave up ground, so a person can decide, on purpose, whether to take it back.