Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Dane’s Body Shop members about strength, nutrition, and training behavior standards. The folks who took those standards seriously became ridiculously strong. It was awesome. But many folks never reached the standards. My coaching partner and I were responsible for planning training, so I wondered why for a long time.
In the years since, working with more youth and more Masters, training at times for endurance and at times for power, some years staying healthy and some years being injured…I’ve realized the standards were higher than necessary. Youth athletes would dramatically improve their performance at lower numbers. Masters athletes move up whole competitive rounds – better teams, higher qualifications, more prestigious competitions – at lower numbers. Return to play is executed just as fully but far more quickly at lower numbers.
Most importantly, other qualities like game knowledge and ball-handling skills became the greatest limiter to performance at lower numbers.
So for one of the first times in my coaching career, I’m lowering the bar!
Standards Are NOT Goals
The last 10 years developing athletes have also taught me very few people understand what a “standard” demands. In a way, this raises that bar right back up.
That’s because there’s a difference between a “standard” and a “goal”.
A goal is aspirational. You achieve a goal. You perform to that level one time on a peak day then you celebrate. You rest after achieving it. Then you set a new goal.
A standard is minimal. You simply do it. You have met standard when you can do the thing any day of the week, in nearly any state of fatigue, without any psych up. Standards only escalate in a domain of scarcity – like limited roster spots or a change in competitive requirements.
If you find you are below standard, nothing else will improve your performance as much as meeting it. If you find you are above standard, some other sport quality is probably more important to reaching higher performance than physical qualities.
This is not to suggest meeting any given standard is easy. Often months or years of consistent work are required to earn a seat at a premier table. Achieving speed & strength standards should be celebrated…the first time. However, after they are reached once, your real training task is to make executing them easier and easier and easier.
In field sports at amateur levels, when an athlete has reached 5 or more of these standards, I have found it is unlikely physical qualities like speed, power, or strength limit their performance. Two disclaimers:
- Any time height or weight change – such as natural changes during teenage and middle age years or as caused by lifestyle changes or catastrophic accidents – training has to address standards all over again. A new body is used as the baseline for all measures.
- No athlete can ever be too fast, too powerful, or too strong. But training time is limited. Meeting standards means less time can be dedicated to physical training and more time can be dedicated to skills training. You never stop training to become run faster, jump higher, or become stronger, you simply re-arrange training by priority.
Note on strength & hormones:
Strength & explosiveness standards are about 10% higher for testosterone-dominant athletes between 13 and 50 years old because of the higher fat-free mass to bodyweight ratio driven by greater testosterone. Normalized for fat-free mass, athletes with the same amount of training perform nearly identically regardless of their sex hormone ratios.
Field Sport Athlete standards
Strength assessments
| Deadlift (3RM) | Pull-up (RM) | Push-up (RM) |
| 1.5 x bodyweight | 3 | 10 |
Power assessments
| Underhand Backward medicine ball throw | Standing Broad Jump | Standing Three Jump |
| n/a (more is always better!) | 1.15 x height | 3.2 x SBJ or 3.7 x height |
Speed assessments
| 60m start* | 20m fly* | 20m start* |
| <= 9.0 sec | <= 2.4 sec | <= 3.4 sec |
(*) these times assume cleats on a flat, firm field
Conditioning assessments
Remember: conditioning is overrated.
Also remember: conditioning is specific to your sport and your role on the team.
Field sport conditioning is essentially repeat sprint ability. Several measures of repeat sprint ability exist, such as the Beep Test. I prefer a very simple measure in the repeated 200 yard shuttle.
| 200yd shuttle [out & back 10-20-30-40 with hand-touch on the line] |
| <42 sec for 3 consecutive reps on 3 min rest |
Justifying Standards
In engineering, there is the idea of test validity. Tests are used to confirm that assemblies function as intended, so the products in which they are used are safe. But the tests themselves have to be valid to assure that function.
“Standard validity” is an important concept. Not all that can be measured matters, after all. It is reasonable for you to wonder: (1) What do these standards mean? and (2) When do they not apply?
Why Bother With Fitness Standards?
Any set of standards is intended to represent, by way of drills which are easy to quantify, if an athlete has the physical qualities necessary to perform in sport. As in my article “The Difference Between Cyclists and Weightlifters”, every athlete needs a particular mix of endurance, strength, speed, and skill that is specific to their sport.
But field sports are uniquely “fuzzy” as Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline used the term in Easy Strength. Defensive stats don’t fully represent a player’s ability or impact. If your team runs an efficient zone defense such that very few passes are attempted downfield, your individual stats for turnovers created might be very low. There’s no stat for “passes that didn’t come to my match-up.”
So these standards reflect physical qualities that imply an athlete could perform at a high level on the field. They describe qualities that everyone accepts are useful – speed, explosiveness, strength, and conditioning. They scale the measures of those qualities to proportions of an athlete’s characteristics, when possible. But they are not comprehensive. They would be useless if they were comprehensive because it would be so impractical to test them. These standards are meant to be representative of strong athletic performance in field sports.
As representations of athleticism, this also means they are not definitive. Other measures could just as (in)accurately predict athletic performance. Some alternatives are provided in the table below. Again, remember the difference between a standard and a goal: you simply do a standard, any day, with any level of fatigue.
An athlete who can pull 150% of their bodyweight from the floor for 3 reps without a second thought and without much warmup is clearly strong. Once you are strong, more of your training time can be focused on creating force quickly (explosiveness) or on creating force repeatedly (endurance).
An athlete who can absolutely always run 5.2 sec to the 40yd dash (the predicted equivalent of 2.4 sec 20m fly capacity) is clearly a Fast Kid. Once you are a Fast Kid, nearly all of your training time can be focused on a better drop kick, a better low-release forehand, or a better read on the offense.
When Do These Standards Not Apply?
In the second part of “The Difference Between Cyclists and Weightlifters”, I compared the roles of maximal strength and arousal on a “strength vs effort” chart. The farther your sport is up the strength scale and up the arousal scale, the less these standards apply to you.
If you compete in strength, it is obvious that you can never spend too much time becoming stronger. If you compete in speed, it is obvious that you can never spend too much time becoming faster. So lifters and sprinters cannot settle for any standard. Ever. They must always continue to develop their basic physical qualities in order to excel at higher levels of their sport.
By this logic, it could be argued that certain competitions have no need for athletic qualities. Chess is the example from that article. E-sports are similar. But don’t confuse low/no-load activities with non-physical activities. Table tennis demands a high level of athleticism. Perhaps the performance standards are lower than those presented here, but no one reaches an advanced level in table tennis without agility and agility is built on a foundation of speed and explosiveness.
These standards were developed for field sport athletes – ultimate, soccer, rugby, flag football, and similar burst-and-repeat sports involving an implement. Further, these standards were developed for amateur athletes, whether high school varsity or club or Masters. Depending on your region’s affinity for your sport, the standards necessary to play in high school may be much higher than the standards necessary to contribute to a championship-winning international team – such as junior varsity American football in Texas compared to World Senior Games 5v5 basketball.
That there are exceptions is no reason to abandon having standards. Every teacher knows students will rise to the level of expectation. So having a standard for all of the performance measures below encourages the athletes I serve to build a broad, solid foundation of athleticism by pursuing each of them.
Explanation of performance measures
(*) fly runs are only an accurate measure of maximum speed if either (a) taken as a split within a short sprint or (b) after extensive acceleration training
| Drill | Insight | Alternatives |
| 3RM deadlift | Maximum strength (force production) | Barbell front or back squat |
| RM pull-up | Strength-to-bodyweight ratio Grip & core maximum strength | Chin-over-bar hold, carries |
| RM push-up | Strength-to-bodyweight ratio Shoulder & core maximum strength | Plank hold, overhead press |
| UHB MB throw | Maximum power (explosiveness) | Any non-technical throw |
| SBJ | Power-to-bodyweight ratio | Vertical jump, CM jump |
| S3J | Explosiveness-to-elasticity ratio | 10-bound, depth jump |
| 60m start | Speed – both maximum & efficiency | Any <120m sprint |
| 20m fly | Maximum speed* | 10m fly, 40yd dash |
| 20m start | Acceleration | 40yd dash |
| 200yd shuttle | Repeat sprint ability | Beep test, Sprint Fatigue test |
Take Action On Standards
I didn’t explain it in detail above, but there is a reason for the sequence of standards presented. The essential quality to most field sport athletes is “fitness” – also known as conditioning. As I’ve written before, Conditioning Is Overrated…but you still need it.
Consider the mathematics of these standards:
- to run under 42 seconds in the 200 yard shuttle, which is 8 separate accelerations, you have to be capable of a 60m start in less than 11.6 sec. Much less, like 9.7 – 10.0.
- to run under that time in three trials, you have to be faster still, at most 8.7 sec to the 60m.
- to run the 60 meter start in 8.7 seconds, you must have a top speed capacity of at least 2.5 sec in the 20 meter fly.
- to reach that velocity (20 meters / 2.5 sec = 8 m/s = 17.9 mph), you have to be capable of accelerating efficiently, which means delivering concentric forces at least 25% greater than your bodyweight during short ground contacts (<<1 second).
- to produce 120% bodyweight forces through a single leg is sufficient to jump a significant amount farther than your own height…you can see where this is going.
Conditioning has to be built on a base of speed. If your best 60 is 10.0 seconds, you don’t have the speed reserve to meet that endurance standard. To develop speed, you need explosiveness. To develop explosiveness, you need strength. So the list of standards advances from the most fundamental quality to the most sport-specific quality.
To evaluate whether you meet or are below standard, simply begin with the first row of tests. Proceed down the list until you fail any standard within a row. That quality and the ones surrounding it are what you should spend 3 to 8 weeks developing. When the standard becomes…standard…move on.
The free Crush Your Comeback e-book describes basic training templates for meeting these standards in limited training time while also working on your sports skills. If you’re not on the Saturday Sprinting newsletter yet, sign up then download that ebook from your Subscriber Extras.
If you’d like a training plan built specifically for you which attends to all of these standards in addition to helping manage old injuries, navigate competitions, and master your sport skills, you know how to reach me. I’d be proud to support your athletic development!
To paraphrase Pavel’s Simple & Sinister, just get started, then “repeat until strong.”