Beep Test on a Treadmill

You can copy every speed in the test onto a treadmill and work through the same schedule. The turn at the end of each shuttle is the bit that won't copy across, and those turns are a real part of the job. A treadmill run at bleep test speeds makes a good session and a poor test. Treat whatever level you reach on the belt as a training marker, not a score.

Two practical things get in the way as well. Most treadmills change speed gradually, so each level arrives a few seconds late unless you press the button early. The belt also paces you, which removes the thing the real test keeps punishing: turning tightly and getting back up to speed.

Level 5, shuttle 4 lands at 35 shuttles, 525 metres, about 3:35, finishing at 9.8 km/h (6.1 mph). Put like that it sounds easy, and on a belt it more or less is. On a marked 15m course you've made 35 turns by then, arriving at up to 10.9 of them a minute in the last level. The belt version of 5.4 and the course version of 5.4 are the same number over very different work.

The speeds in this table are worked out from the per-shuttle times the College of Policing publishes, because the guidance gives times rather than speeds. Full background sits on the 15m bleep test page and the UK police bleep test guide.

Every turn costs you energy a belt never charges for. You brake almost to a stop, plant, and accelerate again. Hatamoto and colleagues measured that cost directly in 2014: one 180-degree change of direction took 0.27 ml/kg of oxygen at 3 km/h and 0.99 ml/kg at 8 km/h, and the curve between those points is quadratic, not flat. 8 km/h was the fastest speed they tested, slower than level 1 of the beep test, so the real bill at bleep test pace is higher than the top of that range. The same paper found 30 turns a minute at 3 km/h cost about as much as running straight at 6 km/h.

The beep test turns often, and more often as it speeds up. On the 20m course you turn 7.1 times a minute at level 1 and 15.0 times a minute at level 20. The 15m police course packs them tighter still at any given speed, because the shuttle is shorter.

Holding 13 km/h on a treadmill for 1:00 is not the same job as 11 shuttles at 13 km/h with 11 stops built into it. Anyone who tells you a treadmill level converts cleanly to a shuttle level is guessing.

Treadmill advice almost always includes setting a 1% incline. It traces back to a real study: Jones and Doust (1996), published in the Journal of Sports Sciences. Nine trained male runners ran at six speeds on a treadmill set to several gradients and once outdoors along a level road. A 1% grade matched the oxygen cost of road running at velocities from 2.92 to 5 m/s, which is 10.5 to 18 km/h, over runs of about five minutes.

The thing that study corrects for is air resistance. Outdoors you push through still air; on a belt you don't, and that is the whole gap the incline closes. Turning never came into it, so 1% will not make a treadmill run equivalent to a shuttle run. Set it if you want your belt pace and your road pace to mean the same thing, which is useful here, because the speed range it covers runs from about level 5 to level 20 on the 20m test. Just don't read a shuttle-test equivalent into it.

There is an official treadmill route into UK policing, and it looks nothing like the bleep test at belt speed. In 2016 the College of Policing introduced two alternatives to the 15m shuttle run: the Chester Treadmill Police Walk Test (CTPWT) and the Chester Treadmill Police Run Test (CTPRT). Its job-related fitness standards guidance describes both as "designed for officers with lower limb injuries which prevent them from completing the 15m MSFT because of the turning at the end of each shuttle", and adds that "it is for individual forces to decide when to offer the alternative test to officers".

On the walk test you warm up, then walk briskly at 6 km/h while the gradient rises by 3% every two minutes. A police officer has to keep going for 10 minutes. The run test uses the same idea at 10.4 km/h, with this gradient ramp:

A treadmill builds the engine but never asks you to turn, and turning is what catches people out on test day. Two additions close that gap.

Put the turns back in once a week. Mark out 20 metres in a sports hall, a park or an empty car park, and run the real format with the audio. The setup guide covers cone spacing and the rules on missed beeps, and the beep test app runs both the 20m and 15m schedules.

Train the braking separately. Short reps over the shuttle distance, walking back between them, teach your legs to decelerate and go again. That's the exact quality a treadmill never asks for, and it's cheap to add to the end of a session.

For the wider background on the protocol and what it measures, see the multistage fitness test guide. For a structured build-up, the training programme has the interval sessions.