Toe touch test
Fold forward, note where your hands stop, and read a 0–100 score off the same five bands Limber scores the test with. It takes a minute and needs nothing but floor.
How to take the reading
- Stand with your feet hip-width apart, knees soft — unlocked, not bent.
- Fold forward slowly and reach for the floor. Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain.
- Hold at the bottom and breathe out. Note where your hands are.
- Come up slowly and choose the band below that matches what you saw.
Take it the same way every time: same knee softness, roughly the same time of day, and either always warm or always cold. Range drifts with warmth and with the hour, so a reading taken after a run and a reading taken out of bed are not the same measurement and should not be compared as if they were.
What each band scores
| Band | Where the hands stop | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | More than 20 cm from the floor | 10 |
| 2 | Fingertips to my shins | 35 |
| 3 | Fingertips to the floor | 60 |
| 4 | Knuckles to the floor | 75 |
| 5 | Palms flat on the floor | 95 |
The anchors are Limber’s scale, not a population percentile. They are spaced so that the distance between two of your readings means something — the app measures every later score from the first one you cut, which it calls your datum. Nothing here tells you how you compare to strangers, because we have not measured strangers.
What a forward fold actually measures
All of it at once: hamstrings, glutes, calves, and how much flexion your lower back and hips are willing to give. Two people can stop at exactly the same height for different reasons, and limb proportions alone move the result — long femurs and a short torso make the floor further away at identical tissue length.
That is a limit of the test, not a flaw you can correct for at home, and it is the reason the score is only useful against itself. A 60 today and a 75 in six weeks is a real change in one body. A 60 and someone else’s 75 is two different bodies and two different sets of levers.
0 of 5 tests taken. Every link here carries what you have already measured, so the readings travel with you from one instrument to the next.
Nothing on this site is stored and nothing is sent. Your readings live in the address bar and nowhere else, so a link is a survey and closing the tab loses it. Copy the address if you want to keep it, or take the same tests in Limber, where a reading is kept on the phone and measured against the one before it.
Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain. Mild stretch — four to six out of ten — is the target. Anything sharp, electric or numb is not a stretch: ease out of it.
See a clinician rather than a web page if pain radiates down a leg, if you have numbness, pins and needles or weakness, if the pain followed a fall or an injury, or if back pain came with fever, unexplained weight loss, or any change in bladder or bowel control. This test does not diagnose anything and Limber does not treat anything.
What is a good toe touch score?
Fingertips to the floor with soft knees reads 60 on this scale, and that is a common adult result. Below it, the two lower bands read 35 and 10; above it, knuckles read 75 and palms flat read 95. The scale is Limber's own anchor set, not a population percentile — it is built so the distance between two of your own readings means something, not so you can rank against strangers.
Does this test measure my hamstrings?
Partly. A forward fold is the whole posterior chain plus the spine: hamstrings, glutes, calves, and how far your lower back is willing to flex. Two people can stop at the same height for different reasons. In Limber the toe touch is the only test feeding the hamstring reading and half of the lower-back reading, and the app names the areas it is inferring rather than pretending one fold measured five things.
Should I bend my knees?
Keep them soft — unlocked, not bent. Locking the knees back changes what the test reads and makes the number jump between attempts. Soft, and the same softness every time you take it, is what makes two readings comparable.
Why are there only five bands and no centimetres?
Because you cannot read a centimetre off your own fingertips while folded over. The five landmarks — a hand-span short of the floor, shins, fingertips, knuckles, palms — are things you can report honestly without a helper or a ruler. Two of Limber's five tests are measured in centimetres against a wall; this one is not, and pretending otherwise would add decimal places to a guess.
Is it bad that I cannot touch my toes?
It is a reading, not a verdict. Reach is shaped by limb proportions, spine and hip anatomy, warmth on the day and time of day as well as by tissue length, and none of that makes a low band a health problem on its own. What it does tell you is where you are starting from, which is the only thing a first reading can honestly tell anyone.
How often should I retake it?
Not daily. Range moves slowly and drifts with the hour and the temperature, so day-to-day differences are mostly noise. Limber's default re-test cadence is 21 days, adjustable to 14 or 28, and the same interval works here: take it, put the number down with the date, and take it again in three weeks.
The composite. Whatever you have measured, rolled into one 0–100 reading and drawn as an elevation profile — with the ground you skipped left dashed.
Deep Squat TestThe whole lower body as one screen — depth, heels and whether the bottom of the squat is somewhere you can rest.
Knee to Wall TestAnkle dorsiflexion in centimetres, left and right kept apart. One of two tests in the battery that produce a real measured number.
- Mayorga-Vega D, Merino-Marban R, Viciana J. Criterion-Related Validity of Sit-and-Reach Tests for Estimating Hamstring and Lumbar Extensibility: a Meta-Analysis. Journal of Sports Science & Medicine 2014;13(1):1–14. PMID 24570599
- Weppler CH, Magnusson SP. Increasing muscle extensibility: a matter of increasing length or modifying sensation?. Physical Therapy 2010;90(3):438–49. doi:10.2522/ptj.20090012
Each address was followed to the record it names before it was written down. Where a paper could not be resolved that way, the page names it in the prose and leaves it unlinked rather than guessing at an address.
One reading is a point. Two are a line.
This page scores one test. Limber runs five — toe touch, knee-to-wall, shoulder reach, hip flexor and deep squat — rolls them into a single 0–100 Range Score, cuts that first score as your datum, and measures every later reading from it. The two wall tests are read in centimetres, the per-side tests keep left and right apart, and areas you never tested stay drawn as untested rather than filled in with a guess.
It works offline and needs no account: your readings stay on the phone.
Limber is in build. There is no store listing yet, so there is no download button here — when there is one it will be a link, not a promise.
A self-test, not an assessment. It tells you where one joint is today, on a scale you can repeat, so that the same test in three weeks means something.
Its reading feeds the Range Score, which is the composite of the whole five-test battery. Nothing else happens to it: no account, no cookie, nothing stored and nothing sent.
Where the scoring comes from.
The bands and anchors on this page are the app’s own range_math
table — the same one the product scores a real test with, not a scale invented
for the web. If a number moves in the app it moves here.
Every paper this instrument leans on is listed at the foot of the page, with a DOI or a PubMed record for each one.