Cooper Institute (Law Enforcement)
About this reference
Percentile norms published by The Cooper Institute (Dallas, TX) for use in law enforcement fitness assessments. Widely used by US police departments, the FBI, and military branches. The tables cover sit-ups (1-minute), push-ups (1-minute), and 1.5-mile run time by age group and sex. 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- Institutional monograph with no DOI, not peer-reviewed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
- Population is US law enforcement candidates (likely fitter than the general adult population); 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