Beep Test for Soccer

The beep test in soccer is a 20-meter shuttle run that measures aerobic fitness. You run between two lines 20 meters apart in time with a recorded beep that speeds up every minute, and your score is the last level and shuttle you finished before you stopped making the line in time. Coaches keep using it because it scores an entire squad in about 20 minutes with two sets of cones and a speaker, and it produces one number you can compare across a roster and from one preseason to the next.

You will see the same run called the multistage fitness test, the MSFT or the 20m shuttle run. US school PE uses a close adaptation called the PACER, which opens slightly slower and counts laps instead of levels. Outside the US the test usually turns up under football rather than soccer.

Luc Léger's team published the modern version in 1988: runners start at 8.5 km/h, the pace rises by 0.5 km/h every minute, and the speed for any stage is 8 + 0.5 × the stage number. Léger's work also gives the equation that turns the last stage into an estimated VO₂ max, which is where the oxygen numbers on this page and in the app come from.

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The practical case is easy. It needs no lab, no heart rate straps and nothing per player, and every player understands the result. For a high school or club coach working out who did their summer running, that is usually enough.

The research is less flattering, and worth knowing before you read too much into a score. When 81 Dutch players from professional, premier league amateur, and third division amateur teams ran both a continuous 20m shuttle test and an intermittent version, only the intermittent test separated the competition levels. The standard beep test did not. Work on elite Danish players found the same thing from another angle: how much high-intensity running players did in real matches tracked their Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery score closely (r = 0.71) but had no useful relationship with their VO₂ max or their treadmill result.

A beep test score is a conditioning check rather than a talent filter. It tells you whether a player turned up in shape, and whether the squad is fitter in August than it was in June.

Mark two lines exactly 20 meters apart, allow about a meter of width per runner, and pick a flat surface you can use again next time. Grass in cleats and a turf field in sneakers do not give the same result, so keep the setup consistent if you plan to compare scores later in the season.

Players start behind the line and run on the first beep, touching or crossing the far line before each beep sounds. A level is announced every minute. Most coaches end a player's test after two consecutive missed lines, which is the standard rule, and record the score as level.shuttle, so 10.4 means level 10, shuttle 4. Run the squad in two waves and pair each runner with someone off the field to call their number. Counting 20 players at once from the sideline goes wrong fast.

Warm up properly. A cold squad running a maximal test in the first session of preseason is how you collect hamstring strains.

Full setup guide, with the cone diagram and the rules for missed beeps →

If your college or academy program tests with the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery test instead, that is deliberate. It runs the same 20-meter shuttles but gives you a 10-second jog to recover between each out-and-back pair, which looks a lot more like a match than continuous running does. The Danish group that built it reported that Yo-Yo scores rise with competition level and track changes in form more sensitively than VO₂ max does.

That does not make the beep test useless to a soccer player. It is easier to organize, needs no recovery zone behind the line, and the audio is free and everywhere. Using the beep test for a whole squad in June and the Yo-Yo for a smaller group later in preseason is a reasonable way to run both.

How the Yo-Yo test works →·Yo-Yo vs beep test, side by side →

You do not need a separate running program. Most of what raises a beep test score is already in a well-built soccer week: small-sided games with short recoveries, repeated-sprint work, and one longer interval session where the efforts are hard enough to leave you breathing at the top end for several minutes at a time.

The one thing worth adding is rehearsal. In the last two or three weeks before a tryout, run the actual shuttle format once a week. The turn is a skill. Players who have never practiced decelerating into the line and pushing back out lose a surprising amount of time to it, and they usually go out a level or two earlier than their engine deserves.

The full training program →