The importance of standard operating procedures in physical fitness assessment: a brief review

Background: Physical fitness status is a key aspect of health and, consequently, it is important to create and adopt appropriate interventions to maintain or improve it, and assess it using valid measures. While in other testing contexts, standard operating procedures (SOPs) are commonly and widely adopted, in physical fitness testing, a variety of unstandardized testing protocols are proposed. Aims: The topic of this review was to evaluate the existing literature on SOPs in physical fitness assessment and to provide guidelines on how SOPs could be created and adopted. Method: The electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus were screened and original, peer-reviewed studies that included SOPs, related to physical fitness, were recorded. Results: After the inclusion and exclusion criteria screening, a total of six studies were included and these were critically and narratively analyzed. Conclusions: Standard operating procedures are rarely adopted in the field of physical fitness and a step by step guide has been provided in this manuscript. In the future, it is suggested to follow protocols as a routine, because this is the only way to generalize and contextualize findings.