Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up. My name is Ben

Greenfield and I'm the Get Fit Fit Guy. In the past few weeks in previous episodes about New Year's

resolutions, you've heard me talk about how tracking your fitness progress can help to keep you

motivated and set realistic and specific

fitness goals. But what's the best way to actually track your fitness? Should you see how fast

you can run a mile, how many push-ups or setups you can do, how much you weigh? Well, in this

episode, I'm going to tell you the best tests you can do to track your fitness progress.

And I'll tell you how to test your endurance, your strength, your weight, your body fat, and your

movement skills. You should try to perform each of the tests that I'm about to describe to you

about every four weeks or at the beginning or the end of every month. So we'll begin with how to test

your endurance. In the episode, What is the fat burning zone? You learn how to determine your maximum

fat burning heart rate zone with a simple bicycle test. That same test can be used to keep track of

your endurance. And since it does involve sprinting and impact, it can be used even if you

have something like knee pain or low back pain. So here are the instructions for testing your

endurance. Number one, warm up on a bike for 10 minutes, preferably an indoor bicycle because it's in a

controlled condition. Number two, pedal at your maximum sustainable pace for 20 minutes at a rate of about 80 to 90 RPM.

Make sure you keep that RPM constant every time you repeat this test too.

You should be breathing hard and your legs should be burning, but you should be able to maintain the same RPM and the same intensity for the full 20 minutes.

If your legs begin to get rubbery and you begin to slow down, then you're probably pushing

yourself too hard on this test. Next, record your average heart rate during those 20 minutes,

which means you'll need to be wearing a heart rate monitor or holding onto the handles of the bike that you're using if it takes heart rate. If the bike shows power on the screen,

typically as watts or speed, you need to also record those variables. At the end of the test,

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