You Won’t Notice Losing This Until It’s Gone: 10 Essential Fitness Tests

Robin Arzón opens this episode of Project Swagger with a specific challenge: most people take classes and move their bodies, but they never measure anything. Without a baseline, you cannot know what you are losing until it is gone. The list she presents—ten physical capacities plus a bonus—is not about gym numbers or comparing yourself to anyone else. It is about figuring out what you can do now and what you can do to hold on to it for longer. She plans to be doing all of this until she is "old as fuck."

The Ten Tests and the Mechanisms Behind Them

The first test is the push-up: three sets of ten, off the knees if needed. Arzón recalls a month of heavy push-up programming when she suddenly realized she could do thirty in a row. The mechanism here is simple muscular endurance, and the psychological hook is a private competition—she secretly entered her partner into a challenge to do more push-ups than him. The second test is the farmer's carry: 50% of body weight (25% in each hand) for 30 seconds. This is straight-up practical—picking something up off the floor and moving with it. She learned this capacity training for Hyrox Pro, and before that training cycle, she could not have done it.