The Multistage Fitness Test (MSFT)
What it measures, the protocol in full, the validity and reliability evidence behind it, and how to read a score. Written for GCSE, A-level and BTEC sport students and the people testing them.
Run the Test Free in Your Browser →What Is the Multistage Fitness Test?
The multistage fitness test is a progressive shuttle run over a 20-metre course. A recorded beep sets the pace, you touch each line before the next beep sounds, and the beeps get closer together every minute until you cannot keep up. Whatever level and shuttle you reach at that point is your score.
It goes by a pile of names, all of them the same test: MSFT, the bleep test, the beep test, the 20m shuttle run test and the Léger test. American schools run a close adaptation called the PACER. Exam specifications and sports science papers write it out in full. Everyone else says bleep test. If a mark scheme asks about the multistage fitness test and your teacher calls it the bleep test in lessons, they mean the same 20-metre shuttles.
Luc Léger and colleagues at the University of Montreal published it in 1988, designed for schoolchildren, adults in fitness classes, and athletes in sports with frequent stops and starts. That origin explains why it caught on. A PE department already owns everything it needs.
What Does the Multistage Fitness Test Measure?
The component of fitness is cardiovascular endurance, which you will also see written as aerobic endurance or cardiorespiratory fitness. In an exam answer, that is the phrase to lead with.
From the score you then predict VO₂ max: the largest volume of oxygen your body can take in, transport and use per minute of hard exercise, given in millilitres per kilogram of body mass per minute. The distinction matters for marks, because the test measures how long you last against a set pace and a regression equation converts that into a VO₂ max figure. Nothing about oxygen use is measured on the day. Léger published the equation with age as a term for children, and found the same equation worked for adults with age held at 18.
Our VO₂ max calculator does that conversion for you if you already have a level and shuttle.
Multistage Fitness Test Protocol
- Gather the equipment. A flat, non-slip surface, cones or tape for the two lines, a tape measure, a speaker loud enough to be heard from both ends, and the audio track. A recording sheet helps if you are testing a group.
- Mark out the course. Two parallel lines exactly 20 metres apart, with enough run-off behind each line for people to turn safely. One run from line to line is a shuttle.
- Warm up. Five to ten minutes of light jogging and dynamic stretching. The test finishes at maximal effort, so going in cold risks both injury and a poor score.
- Start at 8.5 km/h. Level 1 gives you 8.47 seconds per shuttle, which feels like a slow jog. The audio calls out each new level as it arrives.
- Speed rises by 0.5 km/h each level. Every level lasts roughly a minute, so the beeps come faster and the shuttles come thicker. By level 20 the pace is 18 km/h, or 4.00 seconds per shuttle.
- Keep up with the beep. Reach the line before the beep and wait for it rather than setting off early. Miss it once and you get a warning and a chance to catch up on the next shuttle.
- Stop on two consecutive misses. Fail to reach the line before the beep on two shuttles in a row and the test is over for that person. Most testers will also pull out anyone who is visibly struggling before that point.
- Record the score as level.shuttle. The last shuttle fully completed, written as level then shuttle, so 9.4 means level 9, shuttle 4. Use the same convention every time. Some testers record the shuttle in progress instead, and the two do not match.
Setup detail, cone spacing and a course diagram are on the how to do the beep test page.
The Numbers Behind the Protocol
Speeds and shuttle counts at five points in the test. Everything here is worked out from the level table this site runs, not copied off a chart.
| Level | Speed (km/h) | Shuttles in level | Total shuttles | Total distance | Elapsed time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8.5 | 7 | 7 | 140m | 0:59 |
| 5 | 10.5 | 9 | 41 | 820m | 5:10 |
| 10 | 13.0 | 11 | 94 | 1,880m | 10:28 |
| 15 | 15.5 | 13 | 157 | 3,140m | 15:41 |
| 20 | 18.0 | 16 | 231 | 4,620m | 20:55 |
Finish every level and you have run 231 shuttles and 4,620 metres (about 4.62 km) in roughly 21 minutes. Very few people do. The full chart, with speed and cumulative distance for all 20 levels, is on the beep test levels page.
Validity and Reliability
Reliability asks whether the test gives you the same answer twice. Léger and colleagues reported test-retest coefficients of 0.95 in 81 adults aged 20 to 45 and 0.89 in 139 children aged 6 to 16. Cooper and colleagues later had 21 active young men repeat the test and found 95% limits of agreement of plus or minus 2.7 ml/kg/min between attempts, which they judged sufficient.
Validity asks whether it measures what it claims to. In the original study the prediction equation correlated with directly measured VO₂ max at r = 0.71 in 188 boys and girls aged 8 to 19, and at r = 0.90 in 77 adults aged 18 to 50. Ramsbottom, Brewer and Williams tested 74 volunteers the same year and found the correlation between shuttle level and measured VO₂ max was 0.92.
Pooling the evidence gives a similar picture. A 2015 meta-analysis covering 57 studies and 78 correlation values put the shuttle score on its own at rp = 0.66 to 0.84 for estimating VO₂ max, higher in adults than in children, and higher again when the score is combined with other variables such as age and body mass.
It is not a settled question, and saying so is worth marks. Cooper and colleagues concluded the test does not give valid VO₂ max predictions in active young men, because it systematically underestimated the laboratory value. Reliable and valid are not the same thing. A test can be consistently wrong.
Advantages
- Almost no equipment. Cones, a tape measure and a speaker. Nothing a sports hall does not already have.
- Whole groups at once. A class of thirty can be tested in one lesson, which is why schools use it instead of a laboratory treadmill protocol.
- Maximal test. It runs to exhaustion rather than stopping at a submaximal heart rate, so it does not have to assume where your ceiling sits.
- Standardised pacing. The pace comes from a recording, not from a tester with a stopwatch, so nobody gets an easier run than anybody else.
- Repeatable. The retest figures above mean a change in score after a training block is likely to be a real change rather than noise.
- Published norms. Score tables by age and sex exist, so a raw number can be compared against a population.
Disadvantages
- It predicts rather than measures. VO₂ max comes out of a regression equation, and at least one study found that equation underestimates the laboratory value.
- Motivation changes the score. Stopping is a decision. Two people with identical aerobic fitness can finish two levels apart depending on how hard they are willing to push.
- Turning is a skill. Decelerating, pivoting and accelerating again at every line rewards agility and punishes heavier runners, neither of which is aerobic fitness.
- Pacing has to be learned. First-timers often sprint the early levels and burn out, so a second attempt flatters them.
- The pace is continuous. It does not reflect the sprint-and-recover pattern of football or hockey. The Yo-Yo test was built for that.
- Maximal effort is not for everyone. It is unsuitable for people with heart or respiratory conditions, and hard on anyone deconditioned or carrying an injury.
- Conditions matter. A slippery floor, a hot hall or a short run-off behind the lines will all drag a score down.
How Results Are Interpreted: Normative Data
A level on its own tells you nothing. Normative data is what turns it into a judgement: a table built from a large sample showing the spread of scores for people of the same age and sex, usually banded from poor to excellent. Level 9 is a middling result for an 18-year-old and a strong one at 50, and the bands are what carry that difference.
Two things to watch when you cite a norm table. It only describes the population it was collected from, so an adult table says nothing useful about a Year 8 class. And different sources band the same scores differently, so name the table you used rather than treating the ratings as absolute.
Full norm tables by age and sex, for men and women from 18 to 65, are on the beep test scores by age page rather than repeated here.
Versions of the Test
20 metres. The standard, and the one every exam specification means. Everything above describes it.
15 metres. UK police forces run a 15-metre version for the Job-Related Fitness Test, with its own level table and its own timings. Scores do not convert between the two courses, because a shorter course packs more turns into the same minute. The 15m bleep test page has that table.
The PACER. American schools run an adaptation of the 20-metre test called the PACER as part of the FitnessGram assessment. It is scored as a total lap count instead of a level and shuttle, its first minute is slower, and it has 21 levels. Lap counts per level match the standard table up to level 20, so scores convert. The PACER test guide covers the comparison.
PACER® and FitnessGram® are registered trademarks of The Cooper Institute. beeptest.net is an independent site and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Cooper Institute.
Printed level tables. Léger's published rule fixes the pace at speed = 8 + 0.5 × the stage number, so the speed at a given level is the same wherever you look it up. If a chart you have been handed lists different shuttle counts or stops at a different level from ours, work to the table you were actually tested on.
Treadmill. A treadmill cannot reproduce the turn at each line, so it is not the same test, but there is a rough level-to-speed mapping if you have no hall. It is on the treadmill bleep test page.
Run the MSFT Free
The test runs in your browser on this site. No signup, no app to install, and it keeps working offline once the page has loaded. It plays the beeps, calls each level, tracks your shuttles and hands you a VO₂ max estimate at the end, so a teacher only has to mark out the course and watch the lines.
If you would rather play the audio from a phone or a hall speaker with no screen involved, the beep test audio page has free MP3s of the full 20m test and the 15m version.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the multistage fitness test?
It is a progressive 20-metre shuttle run used to estimate aerobic fitness. You run between two lines 20 metres apart in time with a recorded beep that speeds up every minute, and you stop once you can no longer reach the line before the beep. It is the same test as the bleep test, the beep test and the 20m shuttle run test, just under a different name.
What does the multistage fitness test measure?
Cardiovascular endurance, which you will also see called aerobic endurance. The score is then used to predict VO2 max, the most oxygen your body can use per minute during hard exercise. It predicts VO2 max rather than measuring it, because measuring it directly needs a gas analyser and a lab treadmill.
Is the multistage fitness test reliable?
Repeatability is its strongest property. Leger and colleagues reported test-retest coefficients of 0.95 in adults and 0.89 in children, and a later repeatability study by Cooper and colleagues put the 95% limits of agreement at plus or minus 2.7 ml/kg/min between two attempts. Validity is the part that gets argued about. That same study found the test underestimated VO2 max against a laboratory measurement.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the multistage fitness test?
It is cheap, needs almost no kit, tests a whole group at once and has published norm tables to compare against. Against that, it only predicts VO2 max instead of measuring it, the score depends on how hard someone is willing to push, and turning ability and body mass affect the result on top of aerobic fitness.
Is the multistage fitness test the same as the bleep test?
Yes. Multistage fitness test, MSFT, bleep test, beep test, 20m shuttle run test and Leger test all describe the same protocol. Exam specifications and sports science papers use the formal name, while everyone else says bleep test.
How long does the multistage fitness test take?
Running all 20 levels takes about 21 minutes, and hardly anyone gets that far. Level 5 comes up at 5:10 and level 10 at 10:28. Add a warm-up and the time it takes to mark out the course on top of that.
Sources
- Léger LA, Mercier D, Gadoury C, Lambert J. The multistage 20 metre shuttle run test for aerobic fitness. Journal of Sports Sciences, 1988;6(2):93-101. Source for the protocol (20m course, 8.5 km/h start, 0.5 km/h per minute, speed = 8 + 0.5 × stage number), the prediction equation, r = 0.71 in 188 children and r = 0.90 in 77 adults, and test-retest reliability of 0.89 and 0.95.
- Ramsbottom R, Brewer J, Williams C. A progressive shuttle run test to estimate maximal oxygen uptake. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 1988;22(4):141-144. Source for the 0.92 correlation between shuttle level and directly measured VO₂ max in 74 volunteers.
- Cooper SM, Baker JS, Tong RJ, Roberts E, Hanford M. The repeatability and criterion related validity of the 20 m multistage fitness test as a predictor of maximal oxygen uptake in active young men. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2005;39(4):e19. Source for the 95% limits of agreement of plus or minus 2.7 ml/kg/min and the finding that the test underestimates laboratory VO₂ max.
- Mayorga-Vega D, Aguilar-Soto P, Viciana J. Criterion-related validity of the 20-m shuttle run test for estimating cardiorespiratory fitness: a meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2015;14(3):536-547. Source for the pooled validity range across 57 studies and 78 correlation values.
Level speeds, shuttle counts, distances and times on this page are computed from the 20m level table this site's test engine runs, not transcribed from a chart.
By Tim · Last updated September 18, 2026