Which fitness test should I use for field hockey?

One that reflects repeated sprints with short recovery rather than a steady run. Matthew Eyles has used the Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test, the multistage fitness test and the 30-15, and notes the intermittent shuttle run test is popular in the Netherlands. Phil Moreland moved away from the beep test on the grounds that a 20 metre shuttle is not a good fit for a repeat sprint sport. With no equipment, a timed number of laps of the pitch is a legitimate starting measure.

What is a good fitness test score for a hockey player?

There is no general table, and be careful with anyone who offers one. The figures coaches quote publicly belong to specific squads, usually full-time internationals in a particular season. The approach these coaches take instead is to set a desired standard and a minimum standard for your own group, make the targets individual and owned by the player, retest, and judge the result against on-pitch output. Phil Moreland's rule is that you do not train to get better at tests.

What do the physical demands of a hockey match actually look like?

Short, repeated bursts. Wouter Blondeel describes hockey as a repeated and intense running based power sport: high speed sprints, explosive accelerations and decelerations, changes of direction, then a brief recovery before the next effort. He notes many games are decided in the last fifteen minutes, when players can no longer hold that repeatedness. Train the pattern, not just the distance.

Is steady running still useful for field hockey fitness?

Yes, as a base. Glenn Turner stresses in Hockey Conditioning Made Simple that hockey is first and foremost an aerobic game and players must be able to run. The gap he highlights is between jogging for an hour and being able to repeat sprints when tired, so laps build the base while game shaped repeated efforts build the match specific fitness.

Do I need a gym or GPS to train hockey fitness properly?

No. Glenn Turner recommends starting with bodyweight squats, push ups and lunges that can be done on any field, while Mick Beunen and Wouter Blondeel both note you can begin monitoring physical demands with simple observation and honest tests before investing in GPS tracking.

aerobic Archives - The Hockey Site

Q: How do I know if my players are actually fit?

Watch for skill errors rather than exhaustion. Glenn Turner's point is that coaches expect to see a player doubled over, but what actually shows up first is a missed chop or a pass that is a metre off because fatigue has arrived. Alongside that, pick a test that matches the sport, set a desired and a minimum standard for your own squad, and retest. A test score only tells you something when it is checked against what the player does on the pitch.

How do I know if my players are actually fit, and what’s a good score?

Quick answer. Pick a test that matches what hockey actually is, which means repeated sprints with short recovery rather than a steady run to exhaustion. Then set two standards for your own squad, a desired one and a minimum, instead of importing a number from somewhere else. Retest, and judge the result against what you see on the pitch rather than against the score itself. On “what counts as a good score”, the honest answer from the coaches on this site is that there is no table to hand you. The numbers they quote are their own squads’ numbers, usually full-time internationals, and several of them say plainly that chasing the score is the mistake.

That is the short version. Here is how these coaches actually approach it.

Pick a test that matches the sport. Matthew Eyles has used most of them, and in Injury Reduction Training Methods he runs through the options: “I’ve used the yoyo test before, the yoyo intermittent recovery test. Back in the day when I first started out as a strength and conditioning coach, it was just a multistage fitness test, the continual twenty minute, 20 metre shuttle. Now what’s becoming very popular is the thirty fifteen… In Holland, what’s popular is the intermittent shuttle run test.” Phil Moreland made the same move and said why, in his pre-season masterclass: “we actually shifted away from the beep test because I don’t think the 20 metre shuttle test, this version of it, is very good for repeat sprint sports like hockey. And we actually moved to the thirty fifteen, which is a much better test.”

You do not need equipment to start. Eyles is blunt about it: “if you don’t have access to these things or you don’t understand them or you’re just doing things by yourself, stand on the corner of the field, tell your athletes to run around five times and time it or six times and time it, and then you’re going to get a bit of a measure.” Wouter Blondeel goes further in Mastering Physical KPIs and describes a whole battery that costs nothing: a standing broad jump or a triple hop on one leg for power, a pull-up or bench press test for upper body, a beep test for endurance, and a homemade repeated-sprint test where you ask for eight sprints with about twenty seconds of rest between each and simply watch whether the times hold up. His question is the useful part: “can he hold these eight sprints for a constant speed, yes or no?”

Two screens that take a minute each. Blondeel’s ankle check is a lunge with the heel down, pushing the knee forward: if the knee cannot travel past the toes, that ankle needs work before anything else does. His core check is a twenty second front plank, and he is watching for the pelvis dropping or a lot of shaking rather than for a time. Neither needs a stopwatch you do not already own.

What you are building is a profile, not a number. Blondeel again: “you have the speed, you have the endurance, you have the core stability stuff, you have a little bit of mobility, and you have some basic strength”. One score tells you almost nothing. Five cheap ones tell you where to spend the winter.

A good score is one you set for your own squad. This is the part that answers the question, and it is not the answer most coaches want. Moreland’s approach was to set “a desired standard and a minimum standard” and benchmark against those, with targets that were individualised and, in his words, “achievable for them, and they own those targets”. Nobody on this site publishes a table of what a club under-16 should hit on a Yo-Yo test, and the numbers the coaches do mention belong to specific squads: Olympic finalists, full-time internationals, particular seasons. Borrowing them is how you end up with a fifteen year old failing a standard that was never written for her.

Do not train to get better at tests. Moreland puts this as a rule: “we don’t train to get better at tests. It’s great that we use tests, and tests give us an understanding of where we might be and where we might need to go… If our training is appropriate, we will improve on the tests.” The moment the test becomes the target, the number stops measuring anything.

Because a good score is not the same as being fit on the pitch. Moreland describes a squad that was fixated on the beep test, and his own reaction: “I don’t really care about the beep test score. What I care more about is your ability to be able to express your fitness and your physicality on the pitch.” He is describing a real gap, not a hypothetical one: “the fitter girls were really fit on the tests, but they hadn’t yet been able to translate that into the performance environment.”

The signal that matters most does not come from a test at all. Glenn Turner gives the best answer to “how do I know” in Hockey Conditioning Made Simple, and it is free: “what people expect is you expect to see the player being sick over the fence or crawling and can’t move. But what I see as a coach is you didn’t make that extra step to make the chop on your forestick, or you meant to pass it to someone and you missed by a metre because you’re starting to fatigue.” Unfitness shows up as skill errors long before it shows up as exhaustion. Watch the last fifteen minutes of a game with that in mind and you have a test that costs nothing and measures the thing you actually care about.

The number can go the wrong way for the right reason. Turner’s own example is worth sitting with: “my best two examples are both my Olympic cycles. We trained too hard and too much because we became full time athletes. And during the course of the three months before the Olympics my beep test went down.” A falling score is not automatically a fitness problem. Sometimes it is a recovery problem wearing a fitness problem’s clothes.

Testing can cost you the players you are testing. Turner has watched it happen: “they’ll miss that training when they know there’s a test on, or they’ll miss that training when they know there’s more running.” His fix for a team that trains once a week is to take the score out of it entirely. “This week it’s a 3k run. I don’t care about your time. So this is really important. I need to see you do the run. I don’t care about your time.” Show them progression instead, even something as small as the same run at a heart rate five beats lower.

And some coaches would rather you did not test at all. Russell Coates is direct about it in Smart Pre-Season Planning: “I think it’s a bit of a shame to be doing endless shuttle runs, beep tests, yo-yo tests, anything you can think of… I feel like times have evolved and it’s time to bring conditioning onto the pitch instead of doing endless fitness drills.” Worth reading before you build a testing week, if only so you know what you are choosing.

If you want one thing measured properly, measure effort. Eyles’ session RPE is the cheapest monitoring tool there is: ask the player how hard that was out of ten, multiply by the minutes they trained, and you have a number. Eight out of ten across a hundred minutes gives 800. If one player is consistently reporting 1,300 for the same session as everyone else, that is worth a conversation, and you found it with a question rather than a GPS vest.

None of this gives you the table you wanted. What it gives you is a defensible way to build your own: choose a test that looks like hockey, set your squad’s own desired and minimum standards, retest, and check the number against what the players actually do in the last quarter. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits, and be suspicious of anyone who hands you a benchmark without telling you whose squad it came from.

Go more in depth here

Phil Moreland

Pre-season Physical Programme

Watch on demand

Wouter Blondeel

Mastering Physical KPIs

Watch on demand

Matthew Eyles

Injury Reduction Training Methods

Watch on demand

More coaching questions: How do I get field hockey players fit for the real demands of a game?, How do I build field hockey fitness without taking players off the ball?, How often should my players train before I’m overcooking them?, What is the best field hockey warm-up to get game-ready and cut injuries?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.

The experts mentioned in this article

Matthew EylesS&C expert from Australia who worked for Hockey India and the Dutch national teams.

Wouter BlondeelS&C expert from Belgium.

Glenn TurnerFormer Australian international player.

Russell CoatesCoach in The Netherlands. Founder of Hockey Platform.

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How do I get field hockey players fit for the real demands of a game?

Quick answer. Fitness for hockey means training the way the game actually loads a player: short, repeated, high intensity sprints, with sharp accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction, followed by a little recovery, and then again. The coaches on The Hockey Site build that on a base of running and simple strength, but they shape the work around match demands rather than steady laps around the pitch.

Getting the heart rate up matters, but the coaches on The Hockey Site would tell you not to stop there. A player who can jog all day and still fades in the final quarter has trained the wrong thing, and running laps rarely fixes it on its own.

Start with what a game actually demands. In his masterclass Mastering Physical KPIs in Field Hockey, Belgian strength and conditioning coach Wouter Blondeel describes hockey as a running based power sport that is, in his words, repeated and intense. He notes that a lot of games are decided in the last fifteen minutes, when players can no longer hold that repeatedness. On his reading, fitness is the ability to produce high speed running and explosive changes of direction over and over, not simply to cover distance. He tracks this as high speed running plus explosive distance, the accelerating and decelerating that comes with every change of direction.

Laps build a base, but they miss the pattern. Glenn Turner is clear that hockey is first and foremost an aerobic game and that, as he puts it, you have to be able to run. In Hockey Conditioning Made Simple he even worries that running conditioning has been slipping in parts of the game. The point is not to abandon steady running, it is to see the gap between being able to jog for an hour and being able to repeat sprints when tired. Laps develop the first, but the game asks for the second.

Train the repeated sprint, not the single one. Mick Beunen, physical performance coach for the Belgian men’s team, makes the case directly in Physically Game Ready. As he says, strong athletes can continue to fire at high speeds up until the last quarter, or the last game of a tournament, which is usually the one that matters most. Hockey, in his description, has become a sport of physical duels, explosive sprints and fast changes of direction. Conditioning, then, should rehearse exactly that shape: accelerate, decelerate, change direction, recover briefly, and go again, rather than one long continuous effort.

Build the engine inside the hockey. Beunen’s preference is to integrate physical work into the hockey session rather than bolt it on afterwards. He talks about focusing on movements and not muscles, and about adding what he calls dual tasks, so that the running comes with decisions, agility and game context attached. For most club and youth coaches, that points towards small sided games, shuttle based drills and repeated efforts with the ball, where the sprinting is real because the situation is real.

Put strength underneath the sprints. Turner argues for getting the foundation and movement right first, and warns against overcomplicating it. Bodyweight squats, push ups and lunges can be done on any field, and he would rather see a player do fifty good bodyweight reps than three heavy ones they cannot control. Beunen frames strength the same way, as the foundation that lets a player accelerate, decelerate and withstand contact repeatedly, but always combined with speed and movement rather than trained in isolation.

Know which efforts matter for which player. Blondeel individualises the demand by role, watching his midfielders closely because so much of a team’s play runs through them. In his framework a midfielder needs sprint distance combined with explosive distance, while an attacker leans more on explosive metres and short bursts. Beunen splits it a similar way, adding that defenders need robustness and goalkeepers need explosivity in several planes. Both are keen to stress that you do not need expensive GPS to start, simple observation and a few honest tests will tell you plenty.

Protect the body that has to repeat. Repeated sprinting only helps if players stay available. In Injury Reduction Training Methods, strength and conditioning specialist Matthew Eyles works through how to build that robustness, and Turner is candid that he has seen too many careers dented by programmes that loaded players before they could move well. The message from both is to earn the right to sprint hard by owning the basic movements first.

Periodise so the fitness peaks when it counts. Beunen builds his year in cycles, roughly three weeks of overload followed by one lighter week so the body can adapt and come back stronger. For coaches wanting to map that across a season, Periodisation for Club Coaches lays out how to plan the phases without needing a full time sports science department behind you.

None of this is a fixed prescription, and the coaches above would be the first to say so. The value is in seeing your own team through the lens of the game’s real demands, then borrowing the ideas that fit your level, your time and your players. The masterclasses below are the place to think it through in more depth.