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A self-test from Black Forest Supplements

Nine tests. One score.

Twenty minutes, no equipment, no appointment. Nine things you can measure on your own floor, each one published as a predictor of how long people live. You will leave with a number.

By Antonio, CEO of Black Forest Supplements

On Wednesday I sent out a national figure: across five decades of American work, the average workday stopped burning about 142 calories it used to burn. The jobs changed. Nobody replaced what the old work had been doing to the body doing it.

A national figure is easy to read and easy to put down. This is the same question asked about you, nine different ways.

What you will need Something to hang from. A staircase with four flights. About four metres of clear floor. A tape measure. That is all. Six of the nine need nothing at all.
Read this first. None of these is a diagnosis and none proves anything on its own. Each is a measurement researchers followed forward in time to see who was still alive later. Do not attempt any of them if you have been told to avoid exertion, if you are unsteady on your feet, or if a fall would be dangerous for you. Do them honestly or do not bother.
Both are used to decide which findings apply to you. Several of these studies were run in one sex or one age band only, and the page will tell you when that is the case rather than scoring you against a group you were not in.

Strength & power · Test 1 of 9

Sit down on the floor and stand back up

Animated figure lowering from standing to sitting cross-legged on the floor and back up

Hands and knees stay off the floor

How to do it
  1. From standing, lower yourself to sitting cross-legged on the floor.
  2. Stand back up.
  3. Start at 10 points. Take one point off each time you use a hand, forearm, knee, or the side of your leg for support, going down or coming up.
  4. Take half a point off each time you wobble badly.
What the research found In 2,002 adults aged 51 to 80, followed a median of 6.3 years, each single point of score was worth 21% better survival. The lowest-scoring group carried 5.4 times the mortality risk of the highest. Brito LBB et al. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology 2014;21(7):892-898. Study →

What did you score?

Strength & power · Test 2 of 9

Push-ups to failure

Animated figure performing a push-up, body straight, chest lowering to the floor

Body straight, chest to a fist off the floor

How to do it
  1. Full push-ups, chest to within a fist of the floor, body in a straight line.
  2. Go until you cannot complete another rep with good form. Stop there.
  3. Count the reps.
What the research found 1,104 men were followed for 10 years, over which 37 cardiovascular events occurred. All but one happened in men who managed 40 push-ups or fewer at baseline. Those who could complete more than 40 had a 96% lower risk of a cardiovascular event than those who managed fewer than 10. Yang J et al. JAMA Network Open 2019;2(2):e188341. Study →
This cohort was male. The 1,104 participants were male firefighters, so they were occupationally active men, and no equivalent study has been run in women. Published push-up norms for women do exist, but they rank fitness against other women rather than predicting anything, and they use a different movement. Scoring a woman against those would mean something quite different from every other test here, so your count is recorded and shown but kept out of the score.

How many did you complete?

Reps, good form only.

Strength & power · Test 3 of 9

Hang from a bar

Animated figure hanging at full stretch from a bar, swaying slightly

Full stretch, feet clear of the ground

How to do it
  1. Hang at full stretch from a pull-up bar, a beam, or a playground frame. Feet off the ground.
  2. Start the timer and hang until your hands open. Not your shoulders. Not your patience.
What the research found Across 139,691 people in 17 countries, every 5 kg of grip strength lost tracked a 16% higher risk of dying of any cause. In that study grip predicted death better than systolic blood pressure did. Leong DP et al. The Lancet 2015;386(9990):266-273. Study →
Read this one carefully. The research measured grip with a hand dynamometer, not a bar. A hang is the version you can do at home, and the thirty-second mark below comes from training practice, not from the study. Treat this as a rough read on whether grip has become a limiting factor, not as a number the researchers would recognise.
0.0
Counts up. Stop it the moment your hands open.

No bar available?

Balance & mobility · Test 4 of 9

Stand on one leg for ten seconds

Animated figure standing on one leg with the other foot tucked behind the calf

Foot behind the calf, arms at your sides

How to do it
  1. Place the front of one foot behind the opposite calf.
  2. Both arms at your sides, eyes forward, looking straight ahead.
  3. Ten seconds, no support. Three attempts allowed. Stand near a wall in case.
What the research found Among 1,702 adults aged 51 to 75 followed for a median of 7 years, 20.4% could not hold it. Of those who could, 4.6% had died. Of those who could not, 17.5% had. Adjusted for age, sex, weight and existing conditions, failing it carried 1.84 times the risk. Araujo CG et al. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2022;56(17):975-980. Study →
10.0
Counts down from ten. Let it reach zero without putting your foot down.

Or record it directly:

Balance & mobility · Test 5 of 9

Walk four metres at your normal pace

Animated figure walking between two marks four metres apart4 m

Your usual pace, not your fastest

How to do it
  1. Measure out four metres, which is about thirteen feet, or roughly the length of a car.
  2. Start walking a couple of paces before the line so you are already up to speed.
  3. Walk it at your usual, comfortable pace. Not fast. This is the one test you should not try to win.
What the research found A pooled analysis of nine studies covering 34,485 adults aged 65 and over, followed between 6 and 21 years, with 17,528 deaths. Predicting survival from age, sex and walking speed alone was as accurate as predicting it from age, sex, chronic conditions, smoking history, blood pressure, body mass index and hospital history combined. Mean walking speed in the pooled group was 0.92 m/s. Studenski S et al. JAMA 2011;305(1):50-58. Study →
This one was measured in older adults. Every cohort in the pooled analysis was 65 or over, mean age 73.5. Below about 60 the thresholds do not carry the same meaning, so the page will record your speed and show you where it sits without scoring it.
0.0
Start as you cross the first mark, stop as you cross the second.

No space to measure?

Cardio-metabolic · Test 6 of 9

Climb four flights of stairs

Animated figure climbing a flight of stairs

Four flights, fast, without running

How to do it
  1. Four flights, roughly 60 steps.
  2. Fast pace, without stopping and without running.
  3. Time it from the first step to the last.
What the research found Climbing it in under 40 to 45 seconds corresponds to more than 9 to 10 METs of exercise capacity. Taking 90 seconds or more corresponds to under 8 METs. METs are the standard unit of exercise capacity, so this is a way of estimating yours without a treadmill. Peteiro J et al., EACVI Best of Imaging 2020, European Society of Cardiology. Release →
The narrowest study of the nine. This was measured in 165 patients already referred for heart testing because of known or suspected coronary disease, not in a general population. Read your result as an estimate of exercise capacity and nothing more. It is not your personal risk of anything, and the mortality percentages attached to it in press coverage do not transfer to you.
0.0
Stop at the top. Do not run.

Or record it directly:

Cardio-metabolic · Test 7 of 9

Your resting heart rate

Two fingers pressed to the wrist with a pulse ring expanding on each beat

Sit still for two minutes first

How to do it
  1. Sit still for two minutes first. This does not work if you have just walked up stairs.
  2. Find your pulse at the wrist or the side of the neck.
  3. Tap the pad below once per beat. The first tap starts a thirty-second window and the page doubles the count.
What the research found A meta-analysis of 46 studies covering 1,246,203 people and 78,349 deaths found that every 10 beats per minute of additional resting heart rate carried a 9% higher risk of death from any cause (RR 1.09, 95% CI 1.07 to 1.12). Zhang D et al. CMAJ 2016;188(3):E53-E63. Study →
Tap
Tap once per heartbeat to begin

Or enter it yourself, if a watch already tells you:

Beats per minute, at rest.
The bands this page scores against are the conventional resting ranges used clinically. The meta-analysis above is continuous and gives the direction and the size of the effect; it does not publish cut-offs. A resting rate is also raised by illness, caffeine, poor sleep and a hundred other things, so a single reading is a snapshot.

Cardio-metabolic · Test 8 of 9

Waist against height

Figure with a tape measure drawing around the waist, against a half-height rulehalf

Waist at the midpoint, breathing out

How to do it
  1. Measure your waist at the midpoint between the bottom rib and the top of the hip bone, at the end of a normal breath out. Not where your belt sits, and do not hold your stomach in.
  2. Enter it with your height, in the same unit.
What the research found A systematic review and meta-analysis covering more than 300,000 adults across fourteen countries found the boundary value for cardiometabolic risk sat at 0.50 for men and 0.50 for women alike. Waist-to-height improved discrimination of adverse outcomes by 4 to 5% over BMI. The authors put it as a single sentence: keep your waist to less than half your height. Ashwell M, Gunn P, Gibson S. Obesity Reviews 2012;13(3):275-286. Study →
Use whatever unit you like, inches or centimetres, as long as both boxes use the same one. The ratio does not care.

Neural · Test 9 of 9

Reaction time

How to do it
  1. Tap the panel to arm it. It turns dark red.
  2. After an unpredictable pause, it turns green. Tap the moment it does.
  3. Five rounds. Tapping early voids that round and it restarts.
What the research found In 898 people measured at age 56 and followed to age 70, both intelligence and reaction time predicted death from any cause. When the researchers adjusted for reaction time, the association between intelligence and mortality stopped being statistically significant. Their reading was that the speed at which you process information is the thing doing the work underneath. Deary IJ, Der G. Psychological Science 2005;16(1):64-69. Study →
Your device is part of this measurement. A browser adds the delay of the screen and of the input itself, and the 1970s laboratory apparatus used in that study did not. The number you get here is only comparable to itself, measured again on the same device. The bands below are typical browser ranges, not thresholds from the study.
Tap to start
Five rounds. Tap the moment it turns green.

Your result

The score

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By domain

One score is a baseline. The second one is the information.

Nothing you just measured means much on its own. What it is worth is the comparison, and the only way to get that is to run it again after enough time has passed for anything to have changed.

Give us a number and we will text you your score now, then text you again in twelve weeks to run it a second time, with this result quoted back so you are not relying on memory.

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Why nine, and not one

Because no single one of these is proof, and each measures something the others miss.

  • The floor test. Strength, flexibility and coordination, all at once.
  • Push-ups. Upper-body endurance.
  • The bar hang. Grip, which is the cheapest read on whole-body strength anyone has found.
  • The one-leg stand. Balance, which holds up well until roughly the mid-fifties and then falls away quickly.
  • Walking speed. The whole machine working together.
  • Four flights. Aerobic capacity under load, which is what a treadmill test measures.
  • Your resting pulse. How efficiently the heart works when nothing is being asked of it.
  • Waist against height. What you are carrying.
  • Reaction time. The nervous system.

Nine reads on nine different things, and nine different ways to decline. A person can be fine on eight and poor on the ninth, which is exactly why they are run together. A cluster raises the question. Only a doctor settles it.

And read the direction of these findings carefully. Every one is an association measured across a population. None of them shows that training the test changes the outcome, and this page is not claiming it does. What the nine have in common is more modest and more useful: they are all things a body can do when something is regularly asking it to, and stops being able to do when nothing is.

One thing before you go

If you scored badly across the board, that is information, not a verdict, and it is the group with the most to gain from the least work. If you scored well across the board, the men in the grip study were young and healthy too, and it left them anyway.

On Tuesday I am sending out the long version of this to keep, free. The same tests, plus what the research says about putting the load back, and how little of it turns out to be enough.

Nothing to buy today. Antonio CEO, Black Forest Supplements

Sources. Brito et al., Eur J Prev Cardiol 2014;21(7):892-898 · Yang et al., JAMA Netw Open 2019;2(2):e188341 · Leong et al., The Lancet 2015;386(9990):266-273 · Araujo et al., Br J Sports Med 2022;56(17):975-980 · Studenski et al., JAMA 2011;305(1):50-58 · Peteiro et al., EACVI Best of Imaging 2020 · Zhang et al., CMAJ 2016;188(3):E53-E63 · Ashwell et al., Obesity Reviews 2012;13(3):275-286 · Deary & Der, Psychological Science 2005;16(1):64-69 · Church et al., PLoS ONE 2011;6(5):e19657.

Your answers are worked out in your browser and stay there. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask us to text you your score, in which case your number and your results are sent to us so we can do that.

This page is general information, not medical advice, and nothing on it is a diagnosis. Do not attempt any of these tests if you have been told to avoid exertion, if you are unsteady on your feet, or if you have a condition that makes a fall dangerous. Speak to your doctor about anything that concerns you.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.