The Yo-Yo Test
A shuttle run with the rest built in: 2 x 20 meters at a pace set by a recording, then 10 seconds of active recovery before the next pair. Here's how to run it, how it's scored, and what the published distances look like for each sport.
Run the Beep Test Free →What the Yo-Yo Test Is
The Yo-Yo test is a fitness test in which you run 20 meters out and 20 meters back in time with recorded beeps, then jog a short recovery loop for 10 seconds before the next pair of shuttles. The beeps come faster as the test goes on. It ends the second time you miss a line, and your score is the distance you covered up to that point.
Jens Bangsbo, a physiologist at the University of Copenhagen, built it in the 1990s for sports where the running is stop-start rather than steady. His group took the Léger multistage fitness test, the test most people know as the beep test, and dropped a recovery period between the shuttles. The peer-reviewed protocol arrived with Krustrup and colleagues in 2003, and the 2008 review in Sports Medicine pulled the evidence together.
That recovery gap is the whole point. Because you get a partial break, you can keep pushing into a harder gear each rep, so the test measures how well you recover between hard efforts as well as how much aerobic work you can hold. Heart rate at exhaustion averaged 100 percent of treadmill maximum in IR1 and 99 percent in IR2, so both versions max out the aerobic system. What separates them is anaerobic load.
The Four Versions, and Who Each One Is For
Two families exist. The Intermittent Recovery tests give you 10 seconds between reps and are the ones sports science actually uses. The Intermittent Endurance tests give you 5 seconds and sit closer to a straight endurance measure. Each comes in a slower level 1 and a faster level 2.
| Version | Start speed | Recovery | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Level 1 (IR1) | 10 km/h | 10 seconds | The version almost everyone means by "the Yo-Yo test". Suits school groups, recreational players and sub-elite squads. |
| Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Level 2 (IR2) | 13 km/h | 10 seconds | Starts fast and leans harder on the anaerobic side. Built for well-trained and professional athletes. |
| Yo-Yo Intermittent Endurance Level 1 (IE1) | 8 km/h | 5 seconds | Shorter break, slower start. Aimed at beginners and less trained groups. |
| Yo-Yo Intermittent Endurance Level 2 (IE2) | 11.5 km/h | 5 seconds | The trained-athlete version of the endurance test. |
There is also a pair of continuous Yo-Yo Endurance tests with no recovery at all, which behave much like a standard beep test. If someone hands you a Yo-Yo track and doesn't say which one it is, it's almost certainly IR1.
How to Run the Yo-Yo IR1 Test
- Set the course. Two cones 20 meters apart mark the shuttle. Put a third cone 5 meters behind the start line: that's the recovery zone. Krustrup's group ran it in a lane 2 meters wide and 20 meters long, marked with cones, on a flat non-slip surface. You need about 30 meters of clear ground in total.
- Start at the start line. On the beep, run to the far cone, get there before the next signal, turn, and come straight back. That out-and-back pair is one rep and counts as 40 meters.
- Use the 10 seconds. As soon as you cross the start line, jog to the recovery cone 5 meters behind you and back again, finishing before the next beep. This is active recovery, not standing around, and skipping it changes the test.
- Keep up as the pace rises. IR1 opens at 10.0 km/h, then steps to 12 km/h and 13 km/h, and after that climbs by 0.5 km/h at a time. IR2 opens at 13 km/h and gets there faster.
- Stop on the second failure. Miss a line and you get a warning. Miss it again and you're out. Record the distance you covered, and note that a tester who lets people run on past two failures is not running the published test.
One tester with a stopwatch and an audio player can put a whole squad through this. The 2008 review notes that 30 athletes can be tested in under 20 minutes using three markers and a CD player.
How the Yo-Yo Test Is Scored
The published score is total distance. Count your completed shuttles, multiply by 40, and that's your result in meters. Thirty completed reps is 1,200 meters. Coaches also quote the speed level and shuttle you reached, written like 16:1, which is why cricket benchmarks look nothing like the distances in the research tables. A level and a distance are two different units.
Bangsbo, Iaia and Krustrup published equations that turn distance into an estimated VO2 max:
VO2max (mL/min/kg) = IR1 distance (m) x 0.0084 + 36.4
VO2max (mL/min/kg) = IR2 distance (m) x 0.0136 + 45.3
Read those with the caveat the authors attached. The correlation between IR1 distance and measured VO2 max was 0.70 across 141 subjects, and 0.58 for IR2 across 71. Their own example: people who all measured 53 mL/min/kg covered between 1,450 and 2,600 meters on IR1. The paper says plainly that estimating VO2 max from the Yo-Yo result is not accurate. If you want a number to train against, use the distance.
Repeatability is decent for a test that runs to exhaustion. Retests a week apart gave a coefficient of variation of 4.9 percent in the original 2003 study, 8.1 percent across a larger group of 28, and 9.6 percent for IR2 across 29 subjects. In practice, a change smaller than about 10 percent is noise. Our VO2 max calculator works from beep test levels rather than Yo-Yo distance, so don't feed a Yo-Yo score into it.
Published Distances by Sport and Level
Every figure below is a group mean from the 2008 Sports Medicine review. They are reference points, not pass marks, and the spread inside any squad is wide.
| Group | Test | Mean distance | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Male soccer, top-elite (international) | IR1 | 2,420 m | 25 |
| Male soccer, moderate-elite | IR1 | 2,190 m | 71 |
| Male soccer, sub-elite | IR1 | 2,030 m | 89 |
| Male soccer, moderately trained | IR1 | 1,810 m | 29 |
| Female soccer, top-elite | IR1 | 1,600 m | 44 |
| Female soccer, moderate-elite | IR1 | 1,360 m | 74 |
| Female soccer, sub-elite | IR1 | 1,160 m | 63 |
| Elite rugby | IR1 | 1,656 m | 23 |
| Sub-elite rugby | IR1 | 1,564 m | 27 |
| Male soccer, top-elite | IR2 | 1,260 m | 54 |
| Male soccer, moderate-elite | IR2 | 1,050 m | 130 |
| Male soccer, sub-elite | IR2 | 840 m | 72 |
| Elite Australian football | IR2 | 720 m | 35 |
| Junior players, professional basketball club | IR2 | 590 m | 12 |
The gap between competitive levels is much wider on IR2 than on IR1, which is the review's evidence that recovering from repeated sprints is what separates elite players. Very few international soccer players scored below 760 meters on IR2, a figure the authors suggest is close to a floor for playing at that level.
Krustrup's 2006 IR2 study puts hard numbers on the same split: international elite players covered 1,059 meters against 771 for moderate-elite players, and fifteen elite players improved their IR2 distance by 42 percent over eight weeks of preseason. Training moves this test. The 2008 review found 15 to 35 percent gains on IR1 and 15 to 45 percent on IR2 after six to eight weeks of high-intensity work.
No cricket figure appears above on purpose. The review charts cricket data from 27 players but never prints the mean in the text, so there's no number here to quote honestly.
Why Cricket Made the Yo-Yo Test Famous
Outside sports science, most people first heard of the Yo-Yo test through Indian cricket. The BCCI made it a selection gate, and players who failed it missed tours, which turned a lab protocol into back-page news.
ESPNcricinfo reported in February 2021 that the benchmark for India's men had been raised from 16:1 to 17:1, and that a 2 km time trial had been added as an alternative: 8 minutes 15 seconds for fast bowlers, 8 minutes 30 for everyone else. Players could pick one of the two, but had to pass one.
Those 16:1 and 17:1 figures are speed levels, not distances, so they don't line up with the meters in the table above. Benchmarks also change, and other boards set their own. Check the current standard with your board or coach rather than trusting a number from an old article.
Yo-Yo Test vs Beep Test
The beep test runs continuously and scores you on a level and shuttle. The Yo-Yo test gives you 10 seconds between reps and scores you on distance. The beep test starts at 8.5 km/h, a speed the Yo-Yo IR1 already exceeds at its opening stage of 10 km/h. Our beep test doesn't reach that pace until level 4.
Neither score converts into the other, because a Yo-Yo distance folds in recovery ability that a continuous run never tests. For the full breakdown of which test suits which sport, see Yo-Yo test vs beep test. If you're deciding between shuttle protocols for a squad, the multistage fitness test guide covers the continuous side, and sports standards lists benchmarks by sport.
Where to Get Yo-Yo Test Audio
This site does not host Yo-Yo audio. Our free MP3s and the in-browser app play the continuous 20m and 15m beep test patterns, which won't run a Yo-Yo test no matter how you count.
The Yo-Yo audio is a commercial product. Bangsbo published a CD version in 2005 through his own Bangsbo Sport, and copies are still sold rather than given away, including through theyoyotest.com. Free uploads float around, but they vary in timing and there's no way to check one against the published protocol by ear.
Whatever you use, don't substitute a beep test track. The 10-second gap is not a pause you can improvise, and a mistimed recovery makes the distance meaningless against any of the reference values above.
Build the Aerobic Base with the Free Beep Test
A Yo-Yo score sits on top of aerobic fitness. You can't recover in 10 seconds without it, and IR1 in particular is mostly an aerobic test. So if you don't have Yo-Yo audio or a marked course, the beep test is a reasonable free stand-in for tracking that base, as long as you don't pretend the two scores are interchangeable.
This site's free beep test runs the 20m protocol in your browser with no signup: beeps, level tracking, and a result at the end. If you're new to shuttle testing, start with how to do the beep test, check where you land on the levels chart, and use the training guide to build the engine. Football (soccer) players can compare against squad benchmarks on the beep test for soccer page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Yo-Yo test?
It's a shuttle-run fitness test built around recovery. You run 20 meters out and 20 meters back at a pace set by a recording, then get a 10-second active break before the next pair of shuttles. The speed climbs as the test goes on, and it ends the second time you fail to make a line before the beep. Jens Bangsbo, a Danish sports physiologist, designed it for sports where the running is stop-start.
What's the difference between Yo-Yo IR1 and IR2?
The starting speed and what fatigues you. IR1 opens at 10 km/h and mostly taxes the aerobic system, and a trained person lasts 10 to 20 minutes. IR2 opens at 13 km/h, draws far more on anaerobic energy, and is usually over in 5 to 15 minutes. Bangsbo, Iaia and Krustrup measured about five times the rate of muscle lactate accumulation in IR2. Use IR1 unless your squad is well trained.
How is the Yo-Yo test scored?
Your result is the total distance you covered, which is your completed shuttles multiplied by 40 meters, since each rep is 20 meters out and 20 back. Coaches often quote the speed level and shuttle instead, which is where cricket's "16:1" and "17:1" figures come from. Those are levels, not distances, so they don't compare to a distance in meters.
Can I estimate VO2 max from a Yo-Yo test score?
Roughly, and the researchers who published the equations say so themselves. Across 141 subjects the correlation between IR1 distance and measured VO2 max was 0.70, and people with the same VO2 max of 53 mL/min/kg covered anywhere from 1,450 to 2,600 meters. Treat the estimate as a ballpark and track your distance instead if you want to see whether training is working.
Is there free Yo-Yo test audio?
Not from us. This site hosts continuous 20m and 15m beep test recordings, which play a different pattern and won't run a Yo-Yo test. The Yo-Yo audio is a commercial product that Bangsbo first published on CD in 2005, and it's still sold rather than given away. Don't swap in a beep test track: the 10-second recovery gap is the test.
What was the Nike SPARQ Yo-Yo test?
SPARQ was a Nike athleticism rating that scored soccer players on four tests: a standing vertical jump, a 20-meter sprint, the arrowhead agility run and the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery test. The Yo-Yo component was the standard protocol, not a Nike variant. The SPARQ business no longer operates, so nobody is issuing SPARQ ratings today.
Sources
- Bangsbo J, Iaia FM, Krustrup P. The Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test: A Useful Tool for Evaluation of Physical Performance in Intermittent Sports. Sports Medicine 2008;38(1):37-51. Source for the test's origin, the version differences, heart-rate responses, reproducibility, the VO2 max equations and every group mean in the norms table.
- Krustrup P, Mohr M, Amstrup T, et al. The Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test: Physiological Response, Reliability, and Validity. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 2003;35(4):697-705. The original peer-reviewed IR1 protocol and the 4.9 percent test-retest figure.
- Krustrup P, Mohr M, Nybo L, et al. The Yo-Yo IR2 Test: Physiological Response, Reliability, and Application to Elite Soccer (PDF). Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 2006;38(9):1666-73. Course setup, the two-failure stop rule, the 9.6 percent IR2 variation, and the elite versus moderate-elite distances.
- Zemková E, Pacholek M. Performance in the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test May Improve with Repeated Trials. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology 2023;8(2):75. Open-access methods confirming the IR1 speed progression of 10.0, 12, 13 km/h and 0.5 km/h steps thereafter.
- Science for Sport, Yo-Yo IR1 and Yo-Yo IR2. Cross-check for the three-cone layout, the 5-meter recovery zone and the IR2 starting speed.
- The Yo-Yo Test: versions and history. Starting speeds and recovery lengths for the Intermittent Endurance versions, and the 2005 CD publication.
- Gollapudi N. Yo-yo level raised to 17:1, time trial of 2km added. ESPNcricinfo, 12 February 2021.
- Topend Sports, Soccer SPARQ rating system. The four soccer SPARQ tests and the note that the program no longer operates.
By Tim · Last updated September 18, 2026