allowing me to describe and actually evaluate for you your favorite things which are aerobic fitness tests so we're going to start here this is what we refer to as direct gas analysis and i'm going to guess that you're not going to have a go at this maybe you will maybe you're lucky enough to have a sports science lab in your school or probably more likely you might go on a trip visit to let's say a sports lab sports science lab at a university say you might maybe get to have a go this but i want to describe it to you before we then go about evaluating and i guess it brings me to an important point i'm going to try and describe these things to you and you can see it's already on the page really but i really want to evaluate these methods for you and with evaluate of course we're looking for those strengths and weaknesses and reaching sort of conclusions off the back of them so descriptions first of all this is a ramp test just to be clear this means that it gets continually harder and what i mean by that is the intensity increases throughout the test so you can almost sort of see it as a bit of a you know multi-stage fitness test for example does that too although this is this is a ramp this is treadmill based now we are measuring effectively oxygen in and we are measuring auction out and of course we're doing that through that face mask which then leads down into the analyzer into the computer which gives the readout and as a result of that we can take the difference between those two figures and that difference by definition is oxygen consumption so we can specifically measure oxygen consumption at different intensities of a specific exercise and i just write down the word specific this is really specific we will know the exact oxygen volume for the exact measure of intensity so what are the positives about this getting into our evaluation positives in green well first of all it is a direct measure that is positive because of course we know therefore that that result is valid and that result is reliable remember your distinctions between valid and reliable valid is testing what it claims to test well we are literally measuring the difference of o2 and therefore that's a consumption um but also it's reliable in sense if you retest it it's likely to be the same result apart from one distinction which i'll make in a second now the weaknesses i'm going to put into red here and here is that distinction the test is maximal now it's actually quite a rare person who can get themselves to a really maximal you know about to flake a kind of kind of um conditioners most people they're called volitional states but most people will drop out before that the other point of course is that this is an exclusive sort of model and the term i want to introduce to you here is that it's a lab test now of course by definition you therefore need a lab and a sports science team available for you to actually go through that so of course they are limitations but this has many many strengths at the elite level for measuring um performance now the one you what's one of the ones you're more likely to have take part in is a multi-stage fitness test try and call it that rather than a bleep test so a couple of key things is reminders the distance is 20 minute 20 minutes the the stages are one minute stages so each stage is one minute and of course it incrementally gets harder per stage if you miss two shuttles you fail and you're out at that particular point but this is where i really want to get to your score let's say you get uh stage eight shuttle six that score leads to a vo2 max prediction okay so that's the ultimate score that we're coming out of here so what are the advantages to this test what are we going to put in green well thing number one is it's great for groups okay it's great for groups which by the way is one of the reasons that you might have done it in school for example and why i wrote that it's great for groups and therefore it's great for teams so if you want to take part in a hockey team for example it's quite likely that you would at some point do this but the other thing is this is a very simple protocol using very basic equipment yeah you've got to have a multi-stage fitness recording of course you have but it's a simple protocol and it's a simple protocol because it's not a lab test it's a field test that doesn't mean we're doing in the field it means we're doing it in the field okay we're doing it in the performance environment therefore that makes it a really accessible one and what might explain to you why you're more likely to do this unless you're performing elite levels now weaknesses guess what this test is also maximal that has its motivational issues remember that term i used volitional states when you give up might be the determining factor we can also say it's a prediction only okay so it's not unlike gas analysis measuring oxygen consumption the other thing is it's poor for non-runners okay so what we mean by this is if you're a swimmer say this is going to be less and less valid although in my experience swimmers actually did quite well in this because of course the aerobic fitness tends to be quite good and often there's a lot of swimmers who combine something we're running anyway let me not get into the triathlon biathlon type consideration here but you might want to just consider the other side of that argument but there's our strengths and weaknesses notice again that we are doing what we are evaluating that's really what i want to do in this particular tutorial now let's get down to this test here it's one of the ones you might know least about it's called the queen's the queen's college step test okay so that's what we're talking about here and i'm going to describe it to you first and then we're going to evaluate it again again i really hope that you're getting a chance to do these in real life so first of all the step is this step here is 41.3 centimeters we see that here right so the step has to be a specific measure this i believe is a female performer so she's gonna be doing 22 steps per minute and as you see she's going to do that for three minutes so she's literally going to metronomically step up and down at the set rhythm 22 steps per minute if she happened to be male she would do 24 steps per minute now this is really where it gets interesting at the end of that three minutes we measure her heart rate and we do that after five seconds of course we could use a heart rate monitor but it could be that we just do uh we just sort of monitor the pulse on the wrist or the carotid artery in the neck but this is really important we take that pulse reading for 15 seconds and we multiply it by four and that gives us a recovery heart rate it tells us where our heart rate of the participant's heart rate got to at the end of that three minutes of aerobic sub maximal work now that gives us an indication of the relative aerobic fitness of this individual now why do we only take why don't we measure it for 60 seconds well of course because over that 60 seconds the heart rate is gonna be falling so we need to take a short burst of heart rate multiplied by four and then of course this is going to give us that immediate post exercise post test holiday if we if we went for a minute a minute later the heart rate's going to be lower by definition right now what are the strengths of this test well first of all unlike all the others it's sub-maximal that means that the motivation aspect is not significant it's also really simple it can be done in most gyms sports halls sports clubs and it's really good for groups now obviously with groups it would involve the individual monitoring their own heart rate maybe that's got a limitation to it but there you go that's where we do it now here's some issues negatives in red we must evaluate this thing of course the measurement that's of the heart rate of course it might have errors might have errors and what i mean by that is when you effectively have to take your own pulse say on your wrist you might miss count you might not get it straight away it might take more than five seconds to find it and the other point i'll just sort of draw it out here is it's a prediction only it is not a measure so a little like our multi-stage fitness test this is a prediction unlike our direct gas analysis which is a measure so there's a weakness of that particular test so queen's college step test do try and make sure you get to actually experience that it's an interesting one to do and finally one of the ones you've probably all done in your pe lessons at some point or another maybe i'm not sure when you should be but we're doing the 12 minute cooper run okay it was this person cooper's got a lot to answer for so the person has to run as far as possible in 12 minutes okay now the point i would make is that this needs to be a very specific distance all right now in this case i've got a 400 i mean it's not very well scaled this person would be giant but we've got a 400 meter exact distance here you know we've got our 100 meters here and we've got our 100 meters here so we know it's 400 meter round right so we know that we're going to measure the distance that's the output we're going to measure for example that person does 1250 meters say in the 12 in the 12 minutes and it must be measurable and that's why i'm saying that specific distance the other thing we say is it must be a flat surface okay we can't be doing inclines and declines now what are the advantages to this well guess what it's super simple it's great for groups so here's the reasons some of the reasons why it gets done in schools of course but there are drawbacks okay it's no good for non-runners okay so if you happen to be in a running base sport let's say football that's probably going to be okay but if you are a cyclist this is not going to be particularly effective for you right to measure your aerobic condition and the other thing is people find this really really really tedious and we can also say as well that it's maximal you're going as hard as you can for 12 minutes that doesn't mean you're going out in a sprint but you're certainly going to be at the absolute limits by the end of it if done properly of course so can i just reiterate a point t before we finish here the point is that our job with these four fitness tests was to describe and to evaluate and i believe we've done that well thank you