TO THE average person, a yo-yo is (a): a toy used to 'walk the dog' and 'rock the baby', (b): a Grammy Award-winning cellist, or (c): a delicious biscuity treat, also known as a melting moment.
To the elite sportsperson, a yo-yo is not fun, musical nor edible. Not unless someone trips, falls and eats dirt in the process of completing one.
The yo-yo intermittent test is best described as the new beep test, the progressive shuttle run used to test athlete endurance. While the yo-yo is close to 10 years old, it has been traditionally overlooked in favour of the beep test when measuring a footballer's fitness.
But Essendon and the Western Bulldogs are bucking that trend, incorporating the yo-yo into their 2009 pre-season testing routines.
Developed by a Danish physiologist with a soccer background, the yo-yo features two 20-metre shuttle runs followed by 10 seconds of recovery. The shuttles become progressively faster until the athlete can no longer complete the runs within the recorded beeps, differing to the beep test by measuring intervals rather than a continuous run with no rest.
Collingwood head of conditioning David Buttifant explains the yo-yo test evaluates an athlete's ability to repeat intervals over a prolonged period – a useful tool in team sports with a stop-start nature, including Australian football.
"The beep test is a progressive load test. What you could say is that it [the yo-yo test] could be more specific to the intermittent sports, whereas a beep test is predominantly looking at endurance and aerobic characteristics," he says.
"It is very specific to soccer and Australian Rules football, tennis, European handball, basketball – those kinds of intermittent sports."
The speed of the yo-yo test builds quicker than the beep test with levels equating to distances covered. An elite footballer might be expected to reach level 14 or 15 on a beep test, but could enter the high teens in the yo-yo format.
"It can go anywhere from between a six and 20," Buttifant says. "I think the Melbourne Victory (soccer players) were getting high teens and 20s. Getting about 20 to 21, they’re looking at over two kilometres. Two-and-a-half would be exceptionally elite."
Though beep and yo-yo tests provide a gauge of individual and team fitness, tests conducted in the field and in the laboratory are the only way to get a true picture of an athlete.
"I think one of the things which we don’t like about the beep test is it takes away that competitive nature," Buttifant says.
"You can really see from a time trial who’s coming first, who’s coming last and I think that inherent nature, that competitive nature, is just something we want to look at as well. It's a good quality for us to assess."
In a sport like football, with so many factors contributing to a team's performance, physiological testing encompasses speed, endurance, power, strength and agility, and how those factors interact in the game environment.
"Then we’ve got anthropometric measures (body measurements) and we’ve got blood measures, then skill components we look at as well ... there’s a balance test we do," Buttifant says.
"There’s a whole array of different tests we do to identify where the group is at collectively and where the individual is at as well."
While the modern game is embracing more science, the make-up of a champion is still a formula that eludes any test.
"What we’ve found in the past is that in the draft camp there’s not one test that is a predictor for draft status," Buttifant says.
"Even though we do a whole battery of tests there’s not one predictor, which is quite interesting."
For fans at least, the absence of a 'magic test' is perhaps what keeps the magic of football alive.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
