What is cardiovascular fitness?
Cardiovascular fitness is the ability of your heart, lungs and organs to consume, transport and utilize oxygen. When you exercise regularly, you can increase your cardiovascular fitness as your heart becomes more efficient at pumping blood and oxygen to the body, and the body becomes more efficient at using that oxygen.
Before discussing cardiovascular fitness in more detail, try this simple self assessment test to give you an indication of your level of fitness, then return to this page.
Our best measure of cardiovascular fitness is called maximum oxygen consumption or VO2max. This is usually measured by having someone exercise on a treadmill until they cannot run any more. Whilst they do this we collect all the air that they breathe out, and this gives an index of the maximum amount of oxygen they can take in. The higher this index value is, the fitter the person. This test examines the ability of the heart and blood vessels to deliver oxygen to the muscles and is therefore a very good test of cardiovascular fitness.
For a lot more information on the VO2max test, click here.
Watch the following video to see a VO2max test being performed.
The treadmill test is very expensive to carry out but there are ways to estimate this measure in your school.
These include the following tests:-
You may have done one of these before but the Multi Stage Fitness Test is a popular and frequently used method to estimate the VO2max. It's used frequently by organisations such as the police service, to assess fitness. You can find out how to carry this out by clicking this link and watching one in progress in this short video. A downloadable multi stage fitness test mp3 audio file is available by right clicking here and selecting "Save target as...." to save the file to your computer.
The other alternative is to carry out the one mile run test. How this works is explained here.
Finally, go to the Summary page to review our tests so far.