Why Implement Fitness Testing in Elite Sport? A Breakdown for Coaches

In this article, Firstbeat’s Sport Scientist Graham Stark explains the importance of conducting regular fitness tests with your athletes, the differences in maximal and submaximal fitness testing, and how Firstbeat’s new fitness testing feature works.

Contents:

• Introduction
• The Challenges of Maximal Fitness Testing
• Why Do Submaximal Fitness Testing?
• Other Factors to Consider
• A New and Easy Way to Conduct Fitness Testing
• Firstbeat Fitness Testing Reporting Explained

Assessment and monitoring of physiological qualities is an important part of any fitness coach’s work, and is beneficial for a number of reasons within the context of enhancing athlete performance.

By gaining insights into your athletes, you are in a better position to make effective decisions on what they need from you as a fitness coach, both in the short and long term. You are able to look at the composition of your team, potentially identify who needs some extra work to reach the required fitness levels, and you can also establish baseline values for each individual to use as a marker during return-to-play protocols following injury.

The specific qualities you decide to test and the protocols utilized will depend largely on the demands of your particular sport.

The Challenges of Maximal Fitness Testing

Cardiorespiratory fitness is a key component of almost every team sport, which historically would be assessed via the use of maximal test protocols such as an incremental VO2max test.

However, there are a number of drawbacks to this method, which can make it challenging to implement within team sport environments (Vesterinen, et al., 2016).

Firstly is the time consideration. Putting a group of 30 athletes through such protocols is extremely time-consuming, which makes repeat testing throughout the season impractical.

Furthermore, maximal testing is uncomfortable and requires full motivation from the athlete, pushing themselves to their limits to get a true result.

Lastly, there is the perception of increased injury risk resulting from pushing an athlete to their maximum, along with the associated fatigue afterwards.

Why Do Submaximal Fitness Testing?

As a result of these limitations, the use of Submaximal Fitness Testing (SMFT) (Shushan, et al., 2024) has become increasingly popular over recent years. It typically takes only a short period of time, ~4 minutes, at a comfortable intensity, ~75-85% HRmax, and can be integrated within existing warm-up protocols or drills, making it easy to implement and repeat throughout a season (Arguedas-Soley, et al., 2024; Shushan, et al., 2023).

For example, you may have a technical drill that is regularly repeated by your Head Coach. If the workload is consistent each time you do it, this could then be potentially adopted as your test. Or if you prefer complete control over the protocol, integrate some shuttle-based running into your initial warm-up phases.

By using repeat testing over time, you are able to monitor changes in cardiovascular fitness without using intensive maximal protocols (Hulin, et al., 2018), and continually review and evaluate whether any adjustments are required to training, either on a group level or individually.

Other Factors to Consider

One drawback of any fitness testing, whether it is maximal or submaximal, is the laborious data processing required to get usable results. The recommended variable for SMFT is the final 60s average heart rate (Shushan, et al., 2023), which means not only does a practitioner have to define when the test period was within their monitoring platform, they also need to clip the final 60s, and also potentially any recovery period if also utilizing Heart Rate Recovery (HRR). This becomes even more complex if athletes are all doing the test at different times.

A New and Easy Way to Conduct Fitness Testing

The new Fitness Testing feature within Firstbeat Sports is designed to make this process easy and convenient, so that you can get meaningful data with minimal clicks, allowing you more time to analyze the data and focus on working with your athletes.

The fitness testing feature allows you to define the duration of your test protocol and whether you want to include the recovery period. Once that is created, you simply need to select which athletes you want to analyze, define the start time (either in bulk or individually), and the rest is done for you.

The automated analysis process will then calculate the Peak 60s Average HR (i.e., the highest average heart rate for any 60s period within your test; this will almost always be the final 60s of the test period) and the HRR. In addition to the results from the current test, you will also be shown how much these have changed from the previous occurrence, as well as variation from an individual’s baselines.

This means that not only are you able to see how all athletes within your team compare, but also whether they have performed above or below their personal baselines, so you can quickly identify if further investigations are required for any athlete. You can expand the individual information to see their recent trends, maybe this one test of an outlier doesn’t cause immediate cause for concern, or perhaps there has been a downward trend in performance that means an intervention may be required.

Fitness Testing Reporting Explained

The reporting for the new Firstbeat fitness testing feature is split into several sections, including:

• Team Summary – quickly identify who your outliers are, who performed well, or who was below expectation
• Comparison Chart – see the heart rate trace for all athletes who took part in the test
• Athletes – a more in-depth look at the individual test results and how they differ from individual baselines

Team Summary

The Team Summary provides you with an overview of the current test results, allowing a quick comparison across your team. You are shown results for the Peak 60s Average Heart Rate, i.e. the highest average HR over a 60s period within your test. This will usually come at the end of your test and follows recommendations to use the average heart rate from the final 60s as the key metric. Also shown is the 60s Heart Rate Recovery, which tells you how quickly your athletes recover after the test and provides a supplementary marker of their condition. “From Previous” tells you how much these have changed since you last conducted the test.

Comparison Chart

This chart shows the heart rate trace for all athletes who took part in the test. It gives you the option to review how everyone’s heart rate behaved during the test and check that all looks correct. For example, is there any individual who doesn’t follow the same pattern as everyone else, perhaps they paced the test poorly or found it too easy?

Athletes

This section provides a more in-depth look at the individual test results and how they differ from individual baselines. Peak 60s Average HR and 60S HRR are shown as described in the Team Summary, but with these, you are also shown the Z-Score* for each individual. This quickly and conveniently shows you how much each athlete’s score has changed compared to their baseline, and whether it is within their typical variation.

For example, if their Peak 60s Avg HR has changed by 5%, but their usual variation is within 10%, we can assess that this particular occurrence is within their normal range.

Expanding the individual athlete shows shown you their recent test results, and where they sit within that individual baseline range. This gives you more context for the current fitness test and how it compares to recent trends for that athlete.

*Z-score is a statistical measure that quantifies the distance between a data point and the mean of a dataset, expressed in terms of standard deviations.

In summary, SMFT is a practical and easy-to-perform method for gaining actionable insights into your athlete’s fitness and enhancing the decision-making process. The new Fitness Testing Feature by Firstbeat Sports takes a lot of the work out of this process, meaning you have the data you require even faster, leaving more time to focus on working with your athletes.

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References 

• Arguedas-Soley, A., Shushan, T., Murphy, A., Poulos, N., Lovell, R.,& Norris, R. (2024). Can We Just Play? Internal Validity of Assessing Physiological State With a Semistandardized Kicking Drill in Professional Australian Football. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. 

• Hulin, B., Gabbett, T., Johnston, R.D., & Jenkins, D.G. (2018). Sub-Maximal Heart Rate us Associated with Changes in High-Intensity Intermittent Running Ability in Professional Rugby League Players. Science and Medicine in Football, 3(2). 

• Shushan, T., Lovell, R., Scott, T.J., Barrett, S., Norris, D., & McLaren, S.J. (2023).  Submaximal Fitness Test in Team Sports: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Exercise Heart Rate Measurement Properties. Sports Medicine, 9(21). 

• Shushan, T., Lovell, R., McLaren, S.J., Buchheit, M., Dello Iacono, A., Arguedas-Soley, A., & Norris, D. (2024).  Assessing Criterion and Longitudinal Validity of Submaximal Heart Rate Indices as Measures of Cardiorespiratory Fitness: A Preliminary Study in Football.  Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 27(8). 

• Vesterinen, V., Nummela, A., Äyrämö, A., Laine, T., Hynynen, E., Mikkola, J., & Häkkinen, K. (2016). Monitoring Training Adaptations With a Submaximal Running Test in Field Conditions.  International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 11(3).