Testing an assessment is essential in creating effective fitness plans and obtaining valuable information in quantifying athletes’ health and performance. Before selecting a test battery, it is critical to sit with your planning team and decide what constructs you are trying to measure. For example, are you trying to measure maximum speed, aerobic fitness, repeated sprint ability, change of direction capability, or some other constructs? Most teams are interested in a variety of these measures. Plenty of tests can be used for each of these and other constructs. You can also create your own.
When selecting tests to perform, there are a few considerations that should be taken into account. The first is whether they measure the construct you’re trying to assess. In other words, if you want to know someone’s anaerobic capability, does this test give you a measure that reports anaerobic capability? This sounds obvious, but we must remember that our athletes perform in the context of the requirements of their sport. So, for example, if a sport requires direction changes, tests to measure anaerobic capability that involve direction changes are more appropriate.
Test reliability should also be considered. Reliability means performing this test multiple times will result in similar outcomes. Regardless of any test, an athlete’s score will always be the combination of their true and error scores. A true score is what we are after. Error scores affect the final score, including measurement noise, the athlete’s capability, and other factors. For this reason, multiple trials are typically taken when performing a test, and then an average or a median is used to balance the measurement. It is vital to remember that measurement errors always exist, and what we are looking for is an athlete’s true score. Reliability is indeed a capability of providing a true score.
Another factor to consider is the collection of data and ease of processing the data. Tests that are more complicated to perform may or may not provide a better estimate of the true score. If they estimate the true score, you must ask if the complexity is worth increasing the true score capability. Often, a test will be dismissed as simple, but its simplicity makes the cost of resources and time worth the potential decrease in accuracy. I value reliability over accuracy if there has to be a trade-off. I prefer a test to be accurate, but I’m willing to use a systematically inaccurate test that consistently gives me the same measure. We often look for changes in the scores when we assess programming, and if the test is systematically off at all times, the change score should be pretty accurate.
Tests that are performed should be helpful, not just for health assessment and baselines, but also for creating program prescriptions. Tests that mimic the requirements of the activity are typically best for training prescription development.
As a functional fitness coach with limited resources, working with a field sport like soccer, the most important variables to understand with our players are maximum aerobic speed and maximal sprint speed. Knowledge of these two numbers for each player will help us present programming specific to that player’s needs in a resource-efficient manner.
Aerobic speed is the running speed a player can maintain while utilizing the aerobic system. Simply put, it is a steady-state running velocity that can be held for at least two minutes. Many tests are used to determine speed, including six-minute runs, mile runs, half-mile runs, etc. They all work as long as the person is running at the highest speed they can run and are very simple to perform. We have a distance and a time from which we can find a velocity, and we can estimate maximum aerobic speed as the average velocity during these tests.
The only problem with these linear tests is that they may overestimate aerobic speed because they tend to be linear. Athletes run straight or slightly curved but make sharp direction changes. Those direction changes add energy requirements and may cause an athlete to move from aerobic to anaerobic at a lower speed. Thus, a test that includes changes of direction is crucial for adequately estimating an individual’s maximum aerobic speed if they play a sport, or changes of direction are essential.
Beep tests are often used to assess fitness and can be used to assess max aerobic speed. The standard test and the intermittent speed test are OK. The problem with these tests is that they are more complicated to understand and determine an individual’s max aerobic speed. For this reason, the 30-15 intermittent fitness test is more suited for being an economical and valid test that will provide reliable max aerobic speed.
In this test, completed over a distance of 40 m, players must move for 30 seconds and recover for 15 seconds. Beeps are used to set timing requirements to ensure the athletes run faster and faster during each stage of the test. I like the 30-15 intermittent fitness test for a few reasons
- Thirty seconds of running and 15 seconds of recovery are more realistic when translating to requirements in a game.
- The 30 m distance is more realistic in terms of the length of distance during a sustained run
- The final score of the intermittent fitness test is the velocity at which the player fails to maintain speed to reach points at the proper time. Therefore, we have a direct measure of velocity from this test.
I have taken the velocity at which the players fail as their aerobic speed. Still, I have adjusted aerobic speed to 90% of their max intermittent fitness test velocity over time. The nice thing about this test is that little computation is needed because the final score is a velocity.
Maximum sprint speed can be found as the fastest running speed a person can attain. The simplest way to see this is by using timing gates, stopwatches, video assessment, and other approaches. The stopwatch approach is sufficient. It may not have the accuracy that timing gates would provide, but it is a good enough estimate for prescription. The only requirement is that the distance is at least 30 m because we know that maximal sprint speed is only attained once we travel at least 30 m. You could run the test from a standing start or a flying start. It’s your preference. Ultimately, we are looking for the velocity of maximal sprint capability.
Coaches often assume that testing days are tough days. I don’t necessarily agree since athletes may be asked to make dozens to hundreds of repetitions of high-intensity actions during a typical training day. A test on a testing day typically consists of a few repetitions of maximal effort. The athletes need to be rested, but it is also essential that the assessment conditions replicate performance conditions. You may also want to assess by performing tests after athletes are tired to see what they can maintain. There are valid reasons for both. But in the end, I am not a proponent of making arrangements for testing days; in fact, I think we can make them part of our regular training. Simply assess one of the activities in your training and record the outcomes.
By adding consistent testing and assessment to your training program, you can obtain valuable information that helps maintain athlete health and increase performance. The best data source to inform us about athlete capacity is consistent data collected from that individual over time. A final word of caution: do not perform tests without a specific reason or intent other than ‘this is what we have always done.’ A progressive coach should be open to new methods to improve your team and athletes.
