How to Run Your Own Athletic Testing
For over a decade we ran athletic combines out of Melbourne, testing thousands of junior and senior athletes on the same five qualities the pros measure. The gym is gone, but the method isn't — and the equipment that used to cost thousands now fits in your pocket. Here is how to run a proper testing day yourself, for a team or a single athlete.
Why test at all?
Because training without testing is guessing. A baseline tells you what to train — the athlete who is slow but springy needs opposite work to the one who is fast but weak. And a re-test every few weeks tells you whether the program is working while there is still time to change it. The full reasoning is in our combine series: the tests and why they matter and how to interpret your results.
The five-test battery
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1. Vertical jump — lower-body power
The single best expression of athletic power. Test a countermovement jump (hands on hips) as your headline number, and if you have ten more minutes, add a paused squat jump, an arm-swing jump and single-leg jumps — the comparisons between them profile exactly what an athlete should train. The Metric Jump app measures and classifies all of them from a phone camera, with force-plate-grade accuracy. Protocol and benchmarks: how to test your vertical jump.
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2. Sprint — speed and acceleration
A 10 m and 20 m sprint from a standing start covers acceleration, the quality that decides most game moments. Mark the distances precisely, start each athlete from the same stationary position, and time with a phone — filming at 60 fps and stepping through frames beats a hand-held stopwatch by a wide margin. (A dedicated Metric sprint app is on our roadmap, built on the same camera engine as our jump and barbell tools.)
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3. Strength — force and bar speed
Maximal strength underpins everything, but true 1RM testing is risky outside a coached environment. Better: pick a staple lift (trap-bar deadlift or squat), work to a heavy set of three with clean technique, and track bar speed with MetricVBT — velocity at a given load is a safer, more sensitive strength measure than grinding max singles, and it doubles as a readiness check all season.
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4. Agility — change of direction
The 5-0-5 is the simplest honest test: sprint 10 m, plant on a line, turn 180° and sprint back 5 m, timed over the final 5 m out and back. Test both turning legs — the side-to-side gap matters as much as the time.
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5. Conditioning — repeat effort
The beep test remains the standard for team-sport aerobic fitness: cheap, repeatable and brutally objective. Run it last — it ruins everything after it.
How to run the day
- Order matters. Fresh and explosive first, fatiguing last: jump → sprint → agility → strength → conditioning.
- Standardise everything. Same warm-up, same surface, same shoes, same time of day, every time. The value of testing is the comparison, and comparisons die when conditions drift.
- Warm up properly, then test cold-blooded. A progressive warm-up with some build-up efforts, then full recovery between maximal attempts — two to three minutes minimum. Best of three attempts counts.
- Record on the spot. A shared sheet, or the app's athlete profiles for jumps and lifts. Data you have to reconstruct later is data you lose.
- Re-test every 4–6 weeks. Often enough to catch a stalled program, rare enough that real adaptation shows up.
What to do with the results
Rank the athlete against themselves, not just the group. The biggest wins come from training the worst quality: the springy athlete who lacks strength lifts, the strong athlete who cannot express it does reactive work, and everyone sharpens technique. If jumping is the priority, our seven-week jump program turns the test result into the training plan. For the deeper interpretation framework — percentile bands, red flags, what tracks with selection — read part two of our combine series.