Fitness testing: look inside for the truth

Is your training program is producing the fitness gains you desire? In fact, is it producing any fitness gains at all (you’d be surprised at how many don’t)? The acid test for competitive athletes is if your race times are coming down through the season, or are better this season than last season. But that assumes all your races are run in identical conditions on identical courses against identical components and at the same time of day, which actually has a significant impact⁽¹⁾. Besides, supposing you don’t race regularly or even at all? How do you know then?

Fitness testing

The key of course is measurement. If you can regularly measure one or two aspects of fitness that are key components of performance for your chosen sport or event, you can discover whether your fitness is increasing, has reached a plateau, or is even decreasing! This then allows you to make any necessary adjustments to your training program – for example to change the intensity distribution or increase/decrease training volume.

The problem with testing fitness however is that you often need to be able measure relatively small changes in performance – perhaps of a few percent – accurately enough to get a meaningful result rather than one that is just the product of measurement error and the day-to-day physiological variability that we all experience. For endurance athletes, aerobic (or cardiovascular fitness) is particularly difficult to get an accurate handle on⁽²⁾. To perform a really accurate measurement requires skilled technicians in a laboratory setting, which is often impractical and almost always very expensive! However, some fascinating new research by a team of sports scientists from Quebec, Canada has just been published, which claims to present a very simple, accurate and elegant solution to the endurance fitness testing conundrum – at least for cyclists.

New fitness-testing research

The new research was published earlier this month in the ‘Journal of Sports Science’⁽³⁾. It investigated the application and accuracy of a simple 8-minute submaximal (ie not requiring pedaling to exhaustion) fitness test for cyclists, requiring no other equipment than a heart rate meter and a power meter with a smart recording device to log power and heart rate data over the 8-minute period (most cycling computers already have this facility built in). What makes this test very different from most fitness testing however is the way it was designed.

Nearly all traditional submaximal tests typically fix some kind of external workload (eg power output, speed) and observe how the body responds physiologically. However, this approach can’t account for how an effort actually ‘feels’ internally (perceived effort – RPE, see figure 1) during that preset workload. RPE is known to be an important factor in performance because even at the same workload and same fitness, RPE can differ on different days and significantly affect overall performance. What this novel testing protocol does however is turn the traditional protocols on their head by fixing the RPE and seeing how the heart rate and power outputs respond to that.

How it works

To develop this test, the researchers gathered together a group of 21 cyclists, and instead of setting submaximal workloads, asked them to undertake the following 3-stage task:

·        Two minutes of submaximal cycling at an RPE effort level they felt was ‘moderate’.

·        Two minutes of submaximal cycling at an RPE effort level they felt was ‘hard’.

·        Two minutes of submaximal cycling at an RPE effort level they felt was ‘very hard’.

During this task the average heart rates and the power outputs for each of the three stages was recorded, as well as for three stages as a whole (ie averaged for the 6-minute period). Following these stages with increasing effort, the cyclists were asked to rest for a further two minutes then perform an all-out maximum-effort sprint for six seconds to determine peak power output.

Table 1: RPE scale and effort levels