CASA GRANDE, Ariz. - Real Salt Lake underwent its preseason fitness tests on Tuesday morning, with the players performing the shuttle run, the 30 meter dash and the infamous beep test at Grande Sports World.
What exactly is the beep test? We'll let RSL Strength & Conditioning Coach Dan Barlow explain.
"The beep test is a test that's used to measure the fitness of all the players when they return from the offseason," Barlow said. "In the test, the players run 20 meters down and 20 meters back with a 10 second break between each run. About every minute the speed of the run increases, with players having to finish the 40 meters a little bit faster to make it back before the beep sounds. The test correlates very well with how much distance players are able to cover in a soccer match, so the better a player does on a beep test, generally, the more distance he's able to cover in a match."
The Claret-and-Cobalt split into three sections for Tuesday morning's tests, breaking into a defender group, a midfielder group and forward/goalkeeper group. Midfielders Javier Morales, Ned Grabavoy, Sebastian Velasquez, Enzo Martinez and David Viana all ran the test to completion, first-year player Carlos Salcedo took top honors amongst defenders and goalkeeper Nick Rimando was best in forward/goalkeeper group.
The players will get back to work on Tuesday afternoon with a more traditional training session.
