Sit Up Test Calculator — Reps Per Minute

The one-minute sit-up test counts trunk flexion repetitions against a clock. Enter your reps and the test duration to get a per-minute rate — and read on, because this is the one event in the battery where the American answer is that the test itself has been retired.

Running the test

1. Lie on your back, knees bent to roughly 90 degrees, feet flat on the floor.
2. Arms crossed over the chest or resting on the thighs. Fingers laced behind the head is the classic error — it loads the cervical spine as the abdominals fatigue and hides how much work the trunk is really doing.
3. Curl the trunk until the shoulder blades clear the floor, then return under control. That is one repetition.
4. A scorer counts complete reps for 60 seconds.

No current U.S. adult battery scores this test

If you searched for a sit-up norm table and everything you found looked slightly different, that is not your search — it is the field. The event has been walked back on two fronts:

School testing. The Presidential Physical Fitness Test’s one-minute sit-up gave way to the FitnessGram battery, which uses a cadence-paced curl-up instead: a partial movement in which only the shoulders leave the mat, fingers slide across a measuring strip, the feet are not held, and the pace is set by an audio track. It stops at 75 repetitions, at loss of cadence, or on a second form correction. Its Healthy Fitness Zone standards run from age 5 to 17, so they are not an adult reference at all.

Military testing. The Navy dropped curl-ups from the Physical Readiness Test in March 2021 and replaced them with a scored forearm plank. The rationale, as published: “The repeated spinal flexion movement of the curl-up is not operationally relevant, may aggravate lower-back injuries and does not appropriately challenge the abdominal musculature.” The Army’s move from the APFT to the ACFT in 2022 likewise left the two-minute sit-up behind.

So the answer to “how many sit-ups in a minute is good for an adult” is that no American body currently publishes one. This page will not invent it.

Sit-up, curl-up and crunch are three different tests

The names get used interchangeably and the protocols are not:

Movement	Range	Feet	Pace
Full sit-up	Trunk all the way up toward the knees	Often anchored	Maximum reps against a clock
FitnessGram curl-up	Shoulders off the mat only	Free	Set by audio cadence
Crunch	Shoulders and upper back off the floor	Free	Varies by program

Scores from one do not convert to another, and neither do their norms. A per-minute rate from your own protocol, tracked over time, is worth more than a band borrowed across protocols.

What to do with the number

Retest every 8 to 12 weeks with an identical setup — same arm position, same knee angle, same scorer if you can. For training rather than testing, the federal guidelines make no distinction about which abdominal exercise you use; they ask for muscle-strengthening work covering the major muscle groups, abdomen included, on at least 2 days a week.

If you want the movement the American testing bodies actually moved to, that is the plank test. For upper-body endurance, run the push-up test, and the fitness test calculator holds the rest of the battery.

This content is informational and does not replace evaluation by an exercise professional.