Nowadays, many wristwatches provide information to support training, so should a recreational athlete do a more formal fitness test, such as a treadmill test? Maastohiihto.com talked with an expert Mikko Virtanen from Vuokatti Sport about fitness testing.

According to Virtanen, wrist devices provide information on one’s thresholds “pretty well,” but you need laboratory conditions and tests to find the exact thresholds.

“The most important thing with a test is to determine the thresholds and then get instructions on what to do. I do think that is the most essential information from the test. When testing, sport specificity should be used, but I would not start with rollerskiing because you need to have some experience and skiing under your belt. I would do it by running with poles, nordic walking, running, or on a bike,” Virtanen says to Maastohiihto.com.

The test can be done as a level test, where you measure the resistance, i.e., moving at a certain speed or load and taking your heart rate and lactate. Based on that, you can already determine the thresholds quite accurately.

“If you want to be even more precise, a respiratory mask can be used on a treadmill test to measure one’s VO2 capacity. The respiratory variables provide additional information for determining the thresholds, as it is no longer just lactate that is looked at, but other variables are also included. It is the most accurate measure possible, which elite athletes and active recreational athletes use.

Repetition is often good in sports, and that also applies to testing. The value of the test only becomes relevant after the first test.

“There is automatic monitoring. The next test and the test after that will tell you even more than the first test. The first test is the baseline, which gives you the threshold and fitness levels. The next test can be used to compare what areas have improved and where there is room for more improvement. It may even be that even if you have practiced a specific threshold, it has not improved, but something else has. We get all this important information out of it,” Virtanen says.

In Finland, Vuokatti Sport is strongly perceived as an elite sports operator, but Virtanen says that recreational athletes are increasingly using testing services. Vuokatti Sport tests three times as many recreational athletes as it tests elite athletes yearly.

Still, a treadmill or fitness test still sounds to many sports enthusiasts like a service only used by elite athletes.

“The bad thing about testing is the word test; it would be better to say a measurement. It is not a matter of life and death, but the information that the test provides is the most important thing.”

Test Feedback Also Gives You Tips

“Asking how to practice this and that area. The coaching insight comes in when you start giving instructions that one should do a relaxed zone 1 training, develop their zone 3 or threshold range, or one’s thresholds are good, but the person has not done enough exercise on the maximal, hard effort. By far, the most important information for all that info is thresholds. In addition, one gets information about what was good, what was bad, what needs to be developed, and how one can develop it,” Virtanen concludes.

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