How Strong and Flexible Are You?

It can sometimes be helpful to measure how strong and flexible you are. One reason for this is to measure your progress over time.

Lower body strength can be measured by the number of squats you can do while holding down weights. Women can use either no weights or around 5-10 pound weights and men 10-15 pound weights. Keep a record and compare over time.

One way to measure upper body strength is by seeing how many pushups you can do. For women, usually doing them with knees bent and keeping your feet off the floor is what is counted. It can be helpful to see how many you can do and repeat this test again every few months to see how much stronger you are. Keeping a journal or something with this information may help to keep you motivated.

If you are interested in how you compare to other people of your age and gender there are statistic available to check. The following table shows the range of the number of pushups that can be done by both men and women of different age groups.

Age	Men	Women
20-29	0-55	0-49
30-39	0-45	0-40
40-49	0-40	0-35
50-59	0-35	0-30
> 60	0-30	0-20

Abdominal strength can be measured by a crunch test, as long as you don't have lower back problems. The following table shows the average range for both men and women of different age ranges. Once again, this test is most helpful for measuring your progress over time.

Age	Men	Women
< 35	15-60	10-50
36-45	10-50	6-40
> 45	5-40	4-30

Flexibility has to do with how far you can move your joints and the muscles attached to them. There are a number of tests you can do to see how flexible some of your joints are. Below are a few of these.

- Toe touching - stand with your feet together and legs straight and try to touch your toes. If you have problems with this you may back lower back problems.

- Shoulder and neck - Put your right hand over and behind your back and your left hand down and across your back and see you your hands can touch. Problems with this could signal shoulder and neck pain.

- thigh - lay down on your stomach and try bending one leg until your heel touches your butt. Problems with this could mean knee pain in the future.

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(Today is: 6 February 2012, 12:51 am)