“We Tested Once and Never Looked at It Again” — Fixing the Most Common Testing Mistake
Ask around enough clubs and you’ll hear the same sentence over and over: “Ah, we did some testing a while back, but sure we never really did anything with it.”
It’s said with a bit of a shrug, like it’s just how these things go. But it’s worth stopping on, because it points at the single most common mistake clubs make with fitness testing — and it’s not the mistake most people think it is.
The mistake isn’t testing the wrong things. It isn’t using the wrong equipment. It’s treating testing as an event instead of a habit.
A snapshot tells you almost nothing
A one-off test gives you a number. Your full-forward ran the Bronco in five minutes flat. Grand. But on its own, what does that tell you?
Is five minutes good? For who? A 24-year-old senior? A 15-year-old still growing? Compared to what he ran last year — better, worse, the same? You don’t know, because you’ve got one data point, and a single data point has no story to tell. It’s a dot on an empty page.
This is why the one-off testing day so often leads nowhere. The numbers get written down, everyone looks at them once, nobody can say whether they’re good or bad, and the sheet goes in a drawer. The effort felt pointless because, honestly, it kind of was. Not because testing is pointless — because testing once is.
The value is in the second test
Everything changes the moment you test the same thing again.
Now that five-minute Bronco isn’t a dot. It’s the start of a line. Twelve weeks later your full-forward runs 4:48, and suddenly you know something real: the work is paying off, he’s getting fitter, the pre-season block did its job. Or he runs 5:09, and you know something just as useful: something’s off, and it’s worth a conversation about load, sleep, or whatever else might be going on.
Direction is the thing coaches actually care about. Not “how fit is he” in the abstract, but “is what we’re doing working.” You only get direction from comparison, and you only get comparison from testing more than once.
The clubs that get value from testing aren’t the ones with the fanciest setup. They’re the ones who test, retest, and look at the gap.
Be honest about what testing won’t do
It’s worth saying plainly: testing won’t make anyone faster. It won’t win you a championship. It’s a measuring tape, not a training programme.
What it does is tell you whether the actual training — the stuff that does make players faster — is working. That’s a supporting role, not a starring one, and clubs that expect testing itself to transform their squad are setting themselves up to be disappointed. The transformation comes from the training. Testing just keeps you honest about whether the training’s any good.
Going in with that expectation is part of why the habit sticks. You’re not testing to perform a ritual. You’re testing to check your own work.
How to make testing a habit, not an event
So how do you become a club that actually uses its testing? A few practical moves:
- Schedule the retest immediately. The day you run your first testing day, put the next one in the calendar. Twelve weeks is a sensible default for most qualities. If the retest isn’t booked, it won’t happen.
- Keep the battery stable. Use the same small battery of tests, in the same order, under the same conditions each time. If you change the test, you’ve broken the comparison.
- Tie it to the calendar you already have. Test at the start and end of pre-season. Test before and after a training block. Hook it onto structure that already exists rather than trying to remember out of nowhere.
- Make the comparison visible. A player who can see “you were here, now you’re here” stays bought in. A player who just gets handed a fresh number every few months loses interest, same as the coaches do.
- Keep it somewhere permanent. If the results live in a different notebook or a different coach’s phone each time, you’ll never line them up. One place, kept over time, is what makes the trend readable — and that place should belong to the club, not the coach.
Where this gets easier
The honest truth is that the habit is the hard part, and no tool fixes that for you. You have to actually run the second test. But the bits around the habit — the scoring, the comparison, the keeping-it-all-in-one-place — those are exactly the bits a tool can take off your hands.
That’s what FitScorePro is for. You run the test, upload the results, and it scores them against age-appropriate norms and lines them up against every previous result for that player automatically. The “is this good?” question gets answered for you, and the “are they improving?” question is right there as a trend instead of something you have to reconstruct from old sheets. Because it’s all kept in one club-owned place, the comparison still works in three years’ time, with a different coach, for a player who’s moved up two age groups.
But start with the principle, tool or no tool: test, retest, look at the gap. Do that and you’ll never again be the club that tested once and never looked at it again.
Curious what your existing results would look like scored and trended? Book a 20-minute demo and bring whatever you’ve got — even an old testing sheet — and we’ll show you the difference a second look makes.