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Lecture Notes

We measure muscular fitness in different ways depending on whether we're interested in someone's muscular strength or their muscular endurance. So for muscular strength, the gold standard test is really a one-rep maximum, finding out what the heaviest weight someone can lift, successfully, one time without sacrificing their form. So using proper form, how much weight can you lift one time? Some alternatives to that one-rep method, if, for safety reasons or for particular populations you don't want to take them to a one-repetition maximum, people might use a three-rep max or a ten-rep max, and here you're looking at how much weight can someone lift for three or ten reps, and then you take a percentage of that to figure out what their one-rep max might be. On the other hand, if you want to test someone's muscular endurance, you would likely use some sort of callisthenic test, so how many push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups could somebody do in one minute, and that really gets at the ability to repeatedly contract the muscles over a longer period of time.