Good speed testing for athletes in Sydney should tell you two things: how fast you are, and why you aren't faster. A stopwatch or a free test gives you the first. Ours is built for the second. Electronic timing gates split by split, every run filmed at 240 frames a second, jumps and change of direction, then a written report and a voiceover on your own footage that names exactly what's costing you the most.
Watch: how we find what's holding an athlete back (8 min)
Plenty of places will tell you they test. So let me show you what ours actually is.
What a free speed test misses
A free speed test tells you where you are. That's useful. But a time on its own doesn't tell you what to fix.
Being told you're quick tells you nothing. Being told exactly where you're losing time tells you everything.
And if you're at a professional club, you're probably already being tested. GPS tells you how far you ran and how fast. Your club measures what the squad needs, because it has 25 players to look after every week. We measure what you need.
Speed testing for athletes in Sydney: what happens on the day
Nothing about assessment day should be a surprise, so here it is in order.
Acceleration and top speed on the gates
You warm up with us first. Then we measure acceleration on electronic timing gates, split by split: 0 to 5 m, 0 to 10 m, all the way through to your top speed. Top speed is shown in km/h.
Every run is filmed at 240 frames a second from multiple angles. That's fast enough to see the exact moment your foot hits the ground, and what happens in the tenth of a second after. When we watch your footage, we're looking at what your foot does on the ground, what it does when it leaves the ground, and where the force goes.
Jumps and hops
Then you do specific jumps and hops that line up with real performance. They show how much force you put into the ground and how fast the ground gives it back. Nothing is in the test for show. Every test is there because it tracks how you really perform on the field.
Change of direction for your sport
Then we look at how you move in more than one direction, specific to your sport. A winger, a rugby league forward and a basketballer don't change direction the same way, so we don't test them the same way.
What to bring
Wear what you train in. Bring water. And come ready to run flat out, switched on. The first few minutes on the line tell me a lot: the athletes who turn up dialled in show better coordination than the ones who are somewhere else.
Every number is compared twice
This is the part most testing skips. Every split, every top speed and every jump is set against two standards: the elite standard for your age, and the world's best, because that's where you're trying to go.
The question isn't whether you're quick for your team. You probably already are. The question is whether you're quick enough for where you want to go.
What the report looks like
Here's a real one from a 14-year-old athlete. It opens with one sentence that sums up the whole thing: he jumps when he should push.
Against the elite standard for his age, his top speed was 87%, his acceleration 84% and his bounding 76%. That order is the whole report. He can run, but he can't start yet.
Every test sits in a table with the gap written down as a number. His first 5 m was 20% off. By the back half of a 20 m sprint, he was ahead of standard. See how much that tells you that a single time wouldn't?
Then the film, slowed right down. Off the line he lost about 200 milliseconds lifting his front leg before he even started to push. Then his hips popped straight up, and over the first few strides he was running on the spot. It looks like a technique problem. It isn't, and that's why drills off the internet never fixed it.
Then his roadmap, in numbers. Twelve months first: his first 5 m from 1.30 to 1.12 seconds. Then year by year, with a top speed target of 33 km/h by year three. Every step is a number he gets retested against, so he always knows if he's on track.
Over all of it sits a 10 to 15 minute voiceover on his own footage, so he hears exactly what we see. Every report names the things costing you the most, shows your strengths too, and sets your priorities in order with a target on each.
The report tells you what's wrong and why. Fixing it is what we coach.
The same sections and the same standards go into the report of a Bundesliga player. The only thing that changes is the level we measure against.
After the test
Then we tell you straight whether a program is worth doing. If it isn't, we'll say so, and tell you where to start instead.
If it is, the report becomes the plan. You train face to face with our coaches at Georges Hall, Roselands or Homebush, and every session is timed and reviewed on film, so the work never drifts back into the habit we're trying to change. You can read how the training side works in speed training Sydney, and how film shows what the eye can't in biomechanical assessment.
We've tested more than 1,000 athletes this way, built on 23 years of trial and error. If you want to know exactly where you're losing time, this is where it starts.