GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness

Andy Galpin frames fitness as a set of trainable adaptations rather than a single global trait. People usually pursue appearance, function, or both, while also hoping to preserve those capacities across a long health span. He distinguishes nine areas: movement skill, speed, power, force or strength, hypertrophy, local muscular endurance, anaerobic capacity, maximal aerobic capacity, and long-duration endurance. Strength is a one-time force limit, whereas muscular endurance is the ability of a local muscle group to repeat a movement; aerobic endurance is a broader whole-body capacity. The time windows provide rough distinctions: all-out work for roughly 30–120 seconds, maximal aerobic efforts for several minutes, and continuous submaximal work generally for at least 20 minutes.

The proposed assessment is intentionally tiered. A laboratory can provide scientific gold-standard tests, but many useful checks require no equipment or cost. Galpin wants the same framework to identify both unusually weak areas and strong areas, then connect each result to a training protocol. Fat loss and general health are not listed as separate adaptations because they emerge from the balance of the nine capacities. A person whose health is limited by strength needs a different program from someone who already has substantial strength but lacks cardiovascular fitness.

Galpin argues that long-term health and function generally require both broad strength training and broad endurance work. He points to a study at the Karolinska Institute comparing healthy octogenarian and nonagenarian cross-country skiers with same-age non-exercisers. The skiers had strikingly high aerobic capacity: their group average was roughly 35–38 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute, near the level of an ordinary college male, while 18 was described as a rough independence threshold. The comparison group averaged near that threshold and therefore had little reserve if illness reduced their fitness. The account illustrates the protective value of lifelong endurance training, but it is presented as an example rather than a universal prescription.