PRE-SEASON SIGNALS a brutal period of back-to-fitness conditioning for professional footballers at teams like Liverpool and Manchester United. Myriad different tests are used by clubs to establish their players’ baseline levels – with intense, lactate-inducing runs almost always concluding their examinations.
Premier League champions Liverpool are a prime example. While former manager Jurgen Klopp preferred a lactate test in the opening days of pre-season, current boss Arne Slot changed things by introducing a six-minute race test. Simply put, players have to run as far as they can around a 400m track in six minutes, and are encouraged to leave everything out there. ‘Go all in,’ Slot told his players. ‘I’m expecting you to win.’
Players are expected to run between 1.5-2km for the test. In a video of the club’s 2024 pre-season, lead physical performance coach Ruben Peeters said, ‘This is a really important test for the manager. It will show your fitness levels, so try to go as fast as possible.’
Six minutes is towards the upper limit of the length of time someone can maintain running at their VO2 max, with results accurately helping to determine a player’s maximum aerobic speed and their aerobic fitness levels. ‘With a six-minute run, you can’t just rely on the anaerobic matchstick; you have to have the aerobic side, too, which the six-minute run reveals,’ Gareth Sandford, an Olympic, college and professional sport scientist, told The Athletic.
Over the course of 90 minutes, PlayerData reports that professional footballers run an average of 10.3km per game, though less than 10% of that distance is completed at a high intensity. As a result, they need large aerobic bases to cope with the demands of top-level football, otherwise the combination of sprints, sharp changes of direction and periods of low-intensity actions would cause significant fatigue and impact performance levels.
Liverpool’s six-minute race test allows fitness coaches to determine just how fit each player is for their relative position, while also providing scope for the altering of individual training programmes.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health UK.
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