With Coach Alexa, Online Running Coach and in-person coaching in South Oxfordshire
Hey team, your We Run Coach Alexa here, coach for Redding, south Oxford and online. I often get runners or people, not necessarily even runners, getting in touch with me about the bleep test.
What the Bleep Test Is
You know, I’ve done this at school back in the day. I certainly did. It is a fitness test kind of vaguely trying to test our speed endurance. It is quite common for jobs that have a physical component to them. Particularly things like the military and the police crop up quite a bit in terms of getting in the first place and also progressing your career within the ranks in the military, for example.
Training Timeframes and Improvements
It is definitely something that as a coach I can help with, with a training plan. With as little as six weeks notice, you can start making improvements in people’s fitness and the aspects of fitness that the test is trying to look at improving.
But I often get people who have either not thought quite that far ahead or have got a date really soon, like in two or three weeks time, where you are not gonna get that much improvement in training and fitness at that point. But what you can do is improve your tactics.
Tools and Setup for Practice
There are bleep test apps out there that will give you the time of the bleeps. You need some sort of tape measure or measuring device to measure out maybe cones at the end in a park or your garden or along your street. Measuring out the distance and practising it in itself will help improve your performance.
Common Mistakes in the Test
It is worth thinking about tactics. What a lot of people do is set off quite quickly, get to the end, have a little stand around for a little bit, and then go quite quickly to the next bit. The beeps speed up, so there is basically less hanging around. What you are effectively doing there is a bit of an interval style session.
A Better Tactic – Treat It as a Progression
A better tactic is to treat it more like a progression session, which runners will be more familiar with. You can actually do the first one or two at a brisk walk, then very gradually get into a run. You are aiming to get to the end just before the beep, so you are not hanging around too much at the end and you are not going too fast too quickly. Your pace throughout the test gradually increases. That can mean you often get one or two stages further along than you would by doing fast shuttle runs from the start.
Preparation Before the Test
The other one to think about is making sure that you do a little bit of prep for the bleep test in terms of what you do beforehand. But generally speaking, the biggest wins are to make sure that you build up gradually into it as opposed to making it an interval training session.
Conclusion
Next video, I’ll cover the bit of prep that you can do. Happy running.
