Background: Age- and sex-specific physical fitness standards are widely used to evaluate population fitness, guide physical education and sport programmes, and support public-health surveillance. However, national systems differ substantially in test selection, age stratification, sex differentiation, normative design, and interpretation of performance thresholds. Uzbekistan has established a nationwide physical fitness testing system covering childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and older age, yet its age- and sex-specific standards have not been comprehensively examined in relation to major international reference frameworks.
Objective: This review aimed to analyse the age- and sex-specific normative structure of Uzbekistan’s national physical fitness standards across the lifespan and to compare their design and interpretive characteristics with established international fitness assessment and reference frameworks.
Methods: A comparative review of the Uzbek national normative testing system was undertaken alongside international frameworks and evidence relevant to youth, adults, and older adults, including Eurofit, ALPHA-Fitness, FitBack, YFIT, FITNESSGRAM/NETFIT, adult field-based fitness evidence, and functional-fitness approaches for older populations. The comparison focused on age-group structure, sex-specific differentiation, test selection, fitness domains, normative versus criterion-referenced interpretation, threshold design, health relevance, and applicability to population surveillance.
Results: Uzbekistan’s system provides a broad lifespan architecture comprising 11 age categories and age- and sex-specific Level I–III performance standards. Sex differentiation is evident from childhood and becomes increasingly pronounced in adulthood through both different thresholds and, in some cases, different test selection. Compared with international frameworks, the Uzbek system demonstrates greater breadth in combining health-related fitness, performance-oriented fitness, motor competence, sport-specific skills, and functional or adapted tasks. International systems, by contrast, more commonly employ smaller standardized test cores and more explicit distinctions between normative reference values, health-related criterion standards, and functional thresholds. The reviewed national documentation does not establish that Uzbekistan’s Level I–III thresholds were derived from health outcomes or validated as health-risk cut-points.
Conclusions: Uzbekistan possesses a comprehensive age- and sex-differentiated physical fitness standards system with substantial potential for national monitoring. Future development should prioritize age-specific validation, transparent derivation of reference standards, clearer separation of performance norms from health-related criteria, sex-specific psychometric evaluation, and improved comparability with international population-fitness surveillance frameworks.