Validity of the 3 min step test in moderate altitude: environmental temperature as a confounder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 3 min step test is a widely used method to evaluate physical fitness, but whether this method is valid when performed at altitude is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of altitude on the fitness score of the 3 min step test, and the role of ambient temperature in this effect. In study I, 11 healthy volunteers (aged 18.1 +/- 1.1 years) performed a 3 min step test at sea level and at altitude (1950 m). Plasma lactate and stress hormones, as indicators of metabolic stress, were measured before and after the test. To determine the role of ambient temperature, we performed study II at sea level with the same step test simulating the altitude temperature condition (24 degrees C at high altitude versus 32 degrees C at sea level) with 23 subjects (aged 20.4 +/- 0.4 y). In study I, plasma lactate of the subjects was elevated during the step test at sea level and to a greater extent at high altitude. Plasma cortisol and testosterone levels were elevated only at high altitude. However, the heart rate (HR) recovery after the step test was faster at high altitude than at sea level, producing a better physical fitness index. Furthermore, in study II, we demonstrated that the subjects who performed the 3 min step test at 24 degrees C exhibited faster HR recovery than at 32 degrees C. The current study therefore suggests that environmental conditions leading to temperature variation have strong confounding effects on the fitness score of the 3 min step test.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".