You’ve begun the journey of learning about your body, your heart. You’ve made the decision to take control of your fitness level. Congratulations! There is very little as key to a great heart rate training experience as having fully customized, personalized Heart Rate Zones and Pace Zones that fit you. When you have this, things just feel right when you are exercising.
Fitdigits includes multiple types of fitness assessments with a Pro Plus or Star Membership, for all levels of users. These assessments help determine your fitness level, using well accepted research as a base for calculating VO2 Max as a proxy for cardiovascular fitness. We’ve taken proven techniques, combined common sense, and designed assessments that can serve to proxy for the full treadmill-hooked-to-a-mask-and-computer traditional fitness test. Why spend hundreds when you have Fitdigits?!
The Beginner Cardio, Advanced Cardio, and Critical Power 30 minute (CP-30) Cardio assessments can help you determine your personal heart rate and pace zones to properly design your exercise regimen and help you hit your goals.
Ready to begin? Let’s do this!
Starting a Fitness Assessment
All Fitness Assessments require a heart rate monitor paired and connected to run an Assessment. Please note any pausing of the workout / assessment will make it null and void as an assessment, though it will still show up as a workout.
To start your assessment, get yourself and your heart rate monitor ready. Find a nice flat and open place where you can move freely. Open the app then:
- Swipe to the activity type you want to do the fitness assessment in.
- Tap the gear / settings icon for the activity type.
- Tap Fitness Assessments to see a list of the different assessments available.
- Assessments like the Rockport Walking Test and Cooper Running Test are only available in some activity types like walking/running.
- Tap on the assessment you are going to do.
The description of the assessment will give you an overview of what is expected for that particular type. It’s good to familiarize yourself with what is expected, though you will also be guided through by voice prompts during the assessment.
- Tap Launch / Launch Assessment to launch the sensor acquisition and get to the ready state. Once all sensors are acquired, tap Start to begin.
- Depending on the assessment, between 7.5 minutes and up to 50 minutes will elapse, guided in stages by voice prompts, taking you through different levels (or continuous levels) of effort throughout the assessment.
When the assessment is complete, you’ll get a summary of Fitness Level and VO2 Max as calculated by the results.
Tap Done, which will take you to your assessment results.
Choose “Set All” to apply these results as your default settings and zones. You can also choose different settings to set individually as well. If you don’t set them as default at this time, you can always do that later.
To see that your Heart Rate or Pace Zones have been set to default, go to the activity you want and tap Activity Settings (gear icon) > Dashboards & Zones > Heart Rate Zones or Pace Zones.
Once you have your own personal heart rate zones, you’ll wonder why you ever did accept the default!
Some experts recommend a new assessment every 6 weeks, some every 6 months to a year, to help track your fitness level and zones through your active life. The newer the active lifestyle is, and the more variation of the training levels, the more often you’ll want to complete one.
Next step – designing custom interval workouts based on your new zones!