How to Run Your First Club Testing Day (Without an S&C Coach)
Most clubs put off fitness testing for one of two reasons. Either they think you need a sports-science degree to do it properly, or they tried it once, ended up with a notebook full of numbers nobody looked at again, and quietly let it drop.
Both are fixable. You don’t need an S&C coach to run a testing day that’s actually worth doing. You need a handful of the right tests, a bit of organisation, and a plan for what happens to the numbers afterwards. Here’s how to get your first one done.
Start with why you’re testing
Before you pick a single test, answer one question: what do you want to know?
If the honest answer is “I’m not sure, it just seems like the done thing”, park it. Testing for the sake of testing is how you end up with that abandoned notebook. But most coaches, once they think about it, do have a question. Who’s actually getting fitter through the year? Which lads are carrying a strength or speed gap that’s holding them back? Is the pre-season work paying off, or just making everyone tired?
Pick the question that matters most to your squad right now. It decides everything else.
Choose a small battery, not a big one
The temptation is to test everything in one go. Resist it. A first testing day with four or five well-chosen tests, run properly, beats a dozen tests run in a rush.
For a typical GAA squad, a solid starting battery looks like this:
- A speed test — a straight 20m or 40m sprint, timed.
- An endurance test — a Bronco or a Yo-Yo, depending on space and what your players are used to.
- A power test — a standing broad jump or a countermovement jump.
- A strength test — a hex bar deadlift for a submaximal set, if you have a gym; a bodyweight measure like chin-ups or a push-up test if you don’t.
That’s it. Four tests covers the qualities that matter for field sport and gives you something to compare against next time. You can always add more later. Our complete guide to fitness testing for GAA clubs goes deeper on each test, and on what to leave out.
One thing to get right from the start: pick tests you can repeat. The value isn’t in today’s number. It’s in the gap between today’s number and the one you get in twelve weeks. A test you can’t run again is a number with no future.
Get the logistics right
A testing day lives or dies on organisation. Players standing around in the cold for forty minutes between tests is how you lose the room.
A few things that make it run smoothly:
- Brief the squad beforehand. Tell them what they’re doing and why. Players try harder when they understand the point.
- Warm up properly. A cold player tests worse and gets hurt more. Build in a proper warm-up — it’s part of the session, not a delay to it.
- Run stations. Split the squad into small groups and rotate them through the tests. Nobody’s idle, and you’re done in a fraction of the time.
- Have a recorder at each station. One person whose only job is writing down numbers, clearly, with the right name beside each one. This is the step most clubs get wrong, and it’s the one that wrecks the data later.
- Order the tests sensibly. Speed and power first, when players are fresh. Endurance last, because it’ll flatten them for anything that follows.
Test young players differently
If you’re testing underage squads, a word of caution. Younger players aren’t small adults, and the testing shouldn’t treat them like they are.
Don’t chase true one-rep maxes with teenagers — it’s unnecessary and adds risk. Use submaximal lifts and work the strength number out from there. Score strength relative to bodyweight, not just absolute load, so a lighter player isn’t marked down for a smaller total.
And remember that at underage level you’re often looking at players who are months or years apart in physical maturity even within the same age group. A late developer posting a modest number isn’t a weaker player. He may just not have grown yet. Keep that in mind before anyone reads too much into a single result.
Make the numbers mean something
Here’s where most testing days fall down. You finish with a sheet full of times and distances, and then… nothing. Nobody knows whether a 4:55 Bronco is good, bad or middling for a 16-year-old. So the sheet goes in a drawer.
A raw number on its own tells you almost nothing. What you need is context: how does this result compare to what’s normal for a player of this age? That’s the difference between “Liam ran 4:55” and “Liam ran 4:55, which is strong for a U16 — he’s in the top quarter for his age.”
The second version is useful. It tells you something, and it gives Liam something to be proud of or to chase. The first version is just ink on a page.
You can build that context by hand if you’re determined — there’s published normative data out there for most standard tests. It’s slow, and you have to be careful about which data you’re using, because not all of it is good. But it’s doable.
Plan the retest before you forget the first one
The single most important thing you’ll do on testing day is decide when you’re doing the next one.
One test is a snapshot. It tells you where a player is on one afternoon. Two tests, twelve weeks apart, tell you a direction — and direction is what you actually care about as a coach. Is this player getting faster, stronger, fitter? Is your training working?
Put the retest in the calendar now, before the first set of numbers even goes cold. Run the same battery, in the same order, under the same conditions. Then the comparison is fair and the trend is real.
Where FitScorePro comes in
Everything above, you can do with a stopwatch, a measuring tape and a lot of patience. Plenty of clubs do.
What FitScorePro does is take the slow, error-prone parts off your plate. You upload the day’s results — even straight from a sign-in sheet — and it scores every one against proper age- and sex-banded norms automatically. No hunting for benchmark tables, no working out percentiles by hand. Each player gets a report you can hand to them or their parents, and the whole thing is kept in one place that belongs to the club, so next season’s coach starts with the full history instead of a blank page.
But the tool is the easy part. The habit is what matters. Run a proper first testing day, plan the retest, and you’ve already done the thing most clubs never get around to.
Want to see your own squad’s data scored and benchmarked? Book a 20-minute demo and bring your last set of results — we’ll have them benchmarked by the end of the call.