Plank test score from the Army Fitness Test tables for your age, from 0 to 100 points, plus where the hold falls among college men or women who planked to failure.
How long should a 30-year-old be able to hold a plank?
Plank test score from the Army Fitness Test tables for your age, from 0 to 100 points, plus where the hold falls among college men or women who planked to failure.
At 30 you are in the Army Fitness Test's 27-31 column for the plank: the 1:20 hold is the 60-point minimum, 2:25 scores 80 points and 3:30 earns the full 100, with the same times for men and women. For a second reference, college students who held a forearm plank to failure had a median of 1:50 for men and 1:12 for women, from a sample that averaged about 20 years old. The calculator below is set to age 30; enter your hold in minutes and seconds, choose your sex and press Calculate.
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Plank test score by age, from two published sources
A 1:30 plank at age 20 is worth exactly 60 points on the U.S. Army Fitness Test, the event minimum, and it places a man between the 30th and 40th percentile of college students who held a plank to failure. Those are the two readings this calculator gives for any hold: the Army points for your age group, which run from 0 to 100, and where the time falls among 194 college men or 277 college women measured by Strand and colleagues.
Timing the hold and filling in four boxes
- Sex - used only for the college comparison. The Army table is the same for men and women.
- Age - whole years from 17. The Army groups ages in five-year bands up to 36, and every age from 37 up shares one column.
- Minutes - the whole minutes of your hold, for example 2 for 2:15. Leave it empty for a hold under a minute.
- Seconds - the rest, from 0 to 59.9; tenths from a stopwatch are fine. Start the clock once your body is straight from head to heels and stop it the moment the hips sag or pike.
- Read the result - Army points and whether the 60-point minimum is met, the seconds to the next row of the table, your college percentile band, the key times for your age and your hold scored in every age group.
Eight holds run through the calculator
Each case below is a result from this page, not a rounded estimate.
Hold 1: the minimum at 20
Situation:man / 20 / 1:30Result: 60 points, the minimum exactly; between the 30th and 40th college percentile.
Hold 2: one minute flat at 25
Situation:woman / 25 / 1:00Result: 10 points, 25 seconds short of the 1:25 minimum for ages 22-26; between the 30th and 40th percentile of college women.
Hold 3: two minutes in the early thirties
Situation:man / 34 / 2:00Result: 74 points; between the 50th and 60th college percentile.
Hold 4: the top of the table at 58
Situation:man / 58 / 3:20Result: 100 points; between the 80th and 90th college percentile.
Hold 5: two and a half minutes at 29
Situation:woman / 29 / 2:30Result: 81 points; above the 90th percentile of college women, whose 90th was 2:22.
Hold 6: a short first attempt at 40
Situation:man / 40 / 0:45Result: 10 points, 25 seconds short of the 1:10 minimum; below the 10th college percentile (1:02).
Hold 7: a 19-year-old student
Situation:woman / 19 / 1:45Result: 64 points; between the 70th and 80th percentile of college women.
Hold 8: the minimum after 37
Situation:woman / 45 / 1:10Result: 60 points; between the 40th and 50th college percentile.
Army plank times by age, from 60 to 100 points
The hold needed for each score in the Army Fitness Test tables, minutes and seconds. Men and women share these times, and the last column covers every age from 37 up.
| Points | 17-21 | 22-26 | 27-31 | 32-36 | 37 and over |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 3:40 | 3:35 | 3:30 | 3:25 | 3:20 |
| 90 | 3:08 | 3:03 | 2:58 | 2:53 | 2:47 |
| 80 | 2:35 | 2:30 | 2:25 | 2:20 | 2:15 |
| 70 | 2:02 | 1:58 | 1:52 | 1:47 | 1:42 |
| 60 (minimum) | 1:30 | 1:25 | 1:20 | 1:15 | 1:10 |
| 0 | 1:00 | 0:55 | 0:50 | 0:45 | 0:40 |
Two things stand out. Each step down in age group takes 5 seconds off the 100-point and the 60-point time, so a 37-year-old needs 20 seconds less than a 17-year-old at both ends. And the scale is not even: between 60 and 100 points one point costs about 3 seconds, while below 60 two points cost one second, so the last half-minute before the minimum is worth 60 points on its own.
College plank percentiles for men and women
Strand and colleagues timed 471 college students, average age about 20, in a forearm plank held to volitional or technique failure. These are the percentiles the calculator compares your hold with.
| Percentile | Men (194) | Women (277) |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | 1:02 | 0:35 |
| 20th | 1:19 | 0:48 |
| 30th | 1:29 | 0:58 |
| 40th | 1:37 | 1:03 |
| 50th (median) | 1:50 | 1:12 |
| 60th | 2:02 | 1:24 |
| 70th | 2:17 | 1:35 |
| 80th | 2:37 | 1:48 |
| 90th | 3:21 | 2:22 |
The same study found that varsity athletes held longer than other students, and that people who trained more than three times a week did better than those who trained less. Most holds ended because the legs or the arms gave out first, not the abdominals: about a third each for legs and arms, about a fifth for the abdominals.
Plank questions with straight answers
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Calculator verified by the LiczGrupa.pl team
Content, formulas and results have been reviewed for accuracy and relevance by our team of specialists.
Reviewed by: Natalia Skrzek