Do you maintain some sort of personal standard to judge you fitness against? For example, even though I'm not in the military, I like to ensure that I can pass the physical readiness tests for both the Army's Airborne school admission and the (right age and gender version of the)United States Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test.
These tests are both somewhat arbitrary but have a broad background of experience base behind them.
From another phase of my career, I was on a committee to research and select a physical readiness test. We found strength tests, agility tests, health and fitness tests and fitness-related job skills tests. Many organizations are now splitting their fitness test and a job skills test.
The fitness test is now (often) becoming a safety and risk management tool. It is intended to answer the question, "is this person likely to become an injury or fatality due to their poor health?" A fitness test may include something like: starting from a resting heart rate, perform X number of repetitions of exercise Y within 2 minutes. Heart rate must not exceed 90% MHR and must return to within 15% of base rate within Y minutes."
Job skills testing chooses physically demanding job tasks and assigns standards to those. For example "pick up a 150-lb dummy and move it across a room, up a flight of stairs and across another room to a finish point within X seconds."
I've been trying to think of what might be a good set of job skills to test for personal defense. The first and most testable that I've come up with has been sprint for a distance approximating one city block.
