Cooper Institute (2013 Monograph)
About this reference
Percentile norm charts published by The Cooper Institute (Dallas, TX) in the 2013 monograph Physical Fitness Assessments and Norms for Adults and Law Enforcement. The monograph is a reference library of about ten norm charts; it is not itself a fixed test battery. Each chart is individually labelled by the origin of its norms — some from Cooper Clinic patients, others from the Law Enforcement Studies cohort. Individual police academies (e.g. CCS, RCTC) pick five or six charts from this menu to build their own field batteries, which is why different academies test different combinations. The six charts used on this site are: 1-minute sit-ups (Cooper Institute), 1-minute push-ups (Cooper Institute), 1.5-mile run (Cooper Institute), 1RM bench press ratio (Cooper Institute), vertical jump (Law Enforcement Studies), and 300m run (Law Enforcement Studies). This is an institutional monograph (not a peer-reviewed journal article); no DOI exists and sample sizes are not disclosed. It is the only source that provides full p5–p95 tables by age and sex for these tests; no peer-reviewed alternative with equivalent coverage was found at time of publication. The norms are cited in peer-reviewed literature including Shusko et al. (2017, doi:10.1093/occmed/kqx127) and Korre et al. (2019, doi:10.1093/occmed/kqz110). For sit-ups (males only), a peer-reviewed alternative exists: Dawes et al. (2017, doi:10.1186/s40557-017-0173-0, n=597 male officers), which was not used as primary source because it lacks female data.
Known limitations
- Institutional monograph with no DOI, not peer-reviewed
- Sample sizes are not disclosed in publicly available tables
- Mixed source populations: individual charts are labelled as either Cooper Clinic patients (self-selected preventive-health cohort) or Law Enforcement Studies (police candidates and officers). Both populations are fitter than the general adult population, so norms are not population-representative
- The under-20 age column covers an undefined age range and is excluded from all metric tables
- No peer-reviewed source with equivalent age/sex coverage exists for the 1.5-mile run; the Cooper Institute monograph is the industry standard for this test