Godin-Shephard Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire
Last reviewed
Three questions about a typical week, scored as a Leisure Score Index
Published by Gaston Godin and Roy Shephard in 1985, this is one of the shortest physical activity questionnaires in use. It asks how many times in a typical week you do strenuous, moderate and mild exercise for more than 15 minutes in your free time. The counts are weighted by intensity and added up. It has been validated against fitness testing and accelerometers and is widely used in research, including in cancer and cardiac populations, because it takes about a minute.
On this site it is offered as a record, not a target. The activity bands were derived for healthy adults, where more is generally better. In post-exertional conditions the right amount of exercise is the amount your body can absorb without a crash, and that can be a very low number, or zero, for a long time. What the questionnaire is good for is capturing what you actually did, week by week, so that changes in capacity are visible, and so that a clinician sees your real activity level rather than a guess. For a more detailed record, including sitting time, see the IPAQ short form.
Your Leisure Score Index
Understanding your score
The weekly counts are multiplied by a weight that reflects the intensity of each category, roughly its energy cost in METs: strenuous ×9, moderate ×5, mild ×3. Godin's 2011 update uses only the strenuous and moderate parts for the health classification, because mild activity contributes little to fitness: 24 or more is classed as active, 14 to 23 as moderately active, and under 14 as insufficiently active. A score of 24 corresponds to the public-health guideline of about 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. The traditional total including mild activity is shown in the breakdown.
The bands describe the general population. They do not apply cleanly to people with post-exertional malaise, for whom the "active" band may be unreachable or actively harmful, and for whom mild activity may be all of the exercise there is. If that is you, the number to watch is your own score over time, and what happened to your symptoms afterwards. A steady score with stable symptoms is a success. A rising score followed by a crash is information.
Note what the questionnaire leaves out: it only counts leisure-time exercise in bouts of more than 15 minutes, so housework, work, short walks and the effort of daily living are not included. For someone with a limited energy envelope those may be the bulk of the week's exertion. The IPAQ short form captures walking and sitting time as well.
This is not an exercise prescription. If you are considering increasing activity, the readiness screen and the pacing guide are the places to start, and your clinician's advice outranks any questionnaire.
Your results over time
Complete this again in a few weeks and the change will show here.
Symptom scores change slowly. A monthly retake is enough to see a trend.
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