Physical Performance Norms Calculator.

6 minute walk test

The ERS/ATS technical standard asks for a flat, straight course of 30 m or more with a hard surface, standard encouragement every minute using fixed phrases, and no warm up. Usual walking aids are allowed and recorded[3]. People walk further on a second attempt, so when change is the outcome the standard asks for two tests at least 30 minutes apart, with the best distance recorded[3].

30 second chair stand

The person sits in the middle of a straight backed chair without arm rests, seat 17 inches (43.2 cm) high, with arms crossed at the wrists. On “Go” they rise to full standing and sit down again as many times as they can in 30 seconds. More than halfway up at 30 seconds counts as a stand, and a person who needs their arms scores 0[7]. In 76 older adults, retest intraclass correlations were .84 in men and .92 in women[9]. Our five times sit to stand page covers the related version that times five stands instead of counting stands in 30 seconds.

Grip strength

The British reference data took the highest of up to six trials, three per hand, mostly with a Jamar dynamometer and mostly seated. Dynamometer type and posture changed the centiles by less than 10%[10]. Enter the best reading from both hands to match.

Usual gait speed

In the NIH Toolbox protocol the person starts with their toes behind the start line and walks at usual pace past a finish line at 4 m to a cone at 5.5 m. After a demonstration and one practice, one trial is timed[15]. Our gait speed biomarker page covers how the same measure is captured with wearables in daily life.

Timed Up and Go

The person rises from an armchair, walks 3 m, turns, walks back and sits down, timed from “Go” until seated[20]. CDC STEADI adds regular footwear, any usual walking aid and a normal pace[21].

Each source publishes the statistics a comparison needs, uses a common protocol, and was checked against the original paper or abstract. A result never mixes sources.

• 6 minute walk. Enright and Sherrill studied 117 healthy men and 173 healthy women aged 40 to 80, and their equations use sex, age, height and weight[1]. The lower limit of normal is predicted minus 153 m for men and 139 m for women, as applied in later cohorts[6]. A 2020 erratum replaced a figure but left the equations unchanged[2]. Gibbons and colleagues is offered for protocols with practice walks, because it describes the best of four walks in 41 men and 38 women aged 20 to 80[4][5].
• 30 second chair stand. The CDC STEADI below average thresholds[7] equal the lower end of the normal range that Rikli and Jones published for community residing US adults aged 60 to 94[8]. That range covers the middle half of their sample.
• Grip strength. Dodds and colleagues pooled 12 British general population studies with 49,964 participants and modelled centiles that showed no skew at any age[10]. The tool uses ages 20 to 90.
• Gait speed. Bohannon and Wang report a mean and SD for each age group in 1,320 US adults aged 18 to 85, walking 4 m at usual pace from a standing start, the same distance as the EWGSOP2 gait speed test[15][12].
• Timed Up and Go. Kear and colleagues give a mean and SD for each decade from 20 to 59, from 200 primary care patients[19]. Bohannon pooled 21 studies of healthy adults aged 60 and over and reported means with 95% confidence intervals[18].

Enright and Sherrill predict the 6 minute walk distance in metres from height in cm, weight in kg and age in years[1]:

Men: 7.57 × height − 5.02 × age − 1.76 × weight − 309
Women: 2.11 × height − 2.29 × weight − 5.78 × age + 667

The lower limit of normal subtracts 153 m for men and 139 m for women[6]. The Gibbons equation uses age and sex only[4]:

868.8 − 2.99 × age − 74.7 × female (female = 1, male = 0)

For grip and gait speed, the z score compares the result with the mean and SD for the age and sex, and the approximate percentile is the standard normal cumulative distribution Φ of z. Grip values between the published ages 20, 25, 30 and so on are interpolated in a straight line.

z = (result − mean) ÷ SD
T score = (grip − peak mean) ÷ peak SD

The grip T score uses the peak of 51.9 kg (SD 9.9) for men and 31.4 kg (SD 6.1) for women, both at age 32. A T score of −2.5 or lower is weak grip[10]. A time over 4 m converts to speed as 4 ÷ time.

These tests are common outcomes in rehabilitation, ageing and respiratory studies, and the reference papers carry numbers that matter when you plan one.

• Learning effect. In 13 studies of people with COPD the second 6 minute walk averaged 26.3 m further than the first. The minimal important difference in adults with chronic respiratory disease is about 30 m, so a single walk at each visit can mistake learning for benefit[3].
• Measurement error. Retesting about 8.6 days apart, usual 4 m gait speed had an intraclass correlation of 0.406 and a minimal detectable change of 0.50 m/s, which limits its use for judging change in one person[15].
• Prognosis. Across 34,485 adults aged 65 and over, each 0.1 m/s faster gait speed went with a pooled hazard ratio for death of 0.88[16].
• Cut points. EWGSOP2 uses grip strength or chair stands to identify probable sarcopenia, and gait speed or the TUG among the tests that grade its severity[12]. FNIH and AWGS set their own grip cut points[13][14], and a usual gait speed below 1.0 m/s identified older people at high risk of adverse health outcomes[17].

For related measures, browse the frailty and geriatrics instruments and the physical function instruments. For cardiorespiratory fitness, the VO2 max calculator compares an estimate with treadmill norms by age and sex. Studies that add wearable step and activity data are described on our movement studies page.

• Population. Each reference comes from one population: healthy adults aged 40 to 80 for the 6 minute walk[1], community residing US adults for the chair stand[8], British general population studies for grip[10], a US NIH Toolbox sample for gait speed[15], and one primary care clinic for the TUG under 60[19].
• Ethnicity and region. Grip norms from developed regions sat 0.12 SD above the British centiles and those from developing regions 0.85 SD below[11]. AWGS sets higher grip cut points for Asian populations[14], and the ERS/ATS standard prefers walk equations built in the local population[3].
• Protocol. Course length, encouragement, number of trials, start type and chair height all move results. For men aged 70 to 79, a 4 m standing start gave 1.07 m/s against 1.26 m/s in a meta analysis of mostly moving starts[15].
• Change over time. The grip centiles are cross sectional and their authors advise against using them to track one person[10].
• Cut points are not diagnoses. At the 13.5 second cut off from Shumway-Cook and colleagues[22], the TUG had a pooled sensitivity of 31% and specificity of 74% for falls, and should not be used on its own[23].
• Rounding. The EWGSOP2 grip cut points are rounded from the Dodds T score of −2.5, so the two can disagree for a reading of 27.0 or 27.1 kg in men and 16.0 or 16.1 kg in women[12][10].