Greatest of All Legends

Chapter 161: Batch A Fitness Test

The players in batch A, including Jason moved to one of the other fields in the training complex where the equipment needed for the fitness test was being set up.

While they waited for the cones to be set up, the players wore innerwear that had been modified to be able to track their vitals and their location which would help the staff determine the distance covered by the players and their movement patterns.

The use of the inner underwear that looked like sports bras allowed for more than one player at a time to undergo the fitness test while being able to monitor their vitals and record their results.

Before the lockdown, more than seven people could do a fitness test at the same time, but due to the current safety regulations that regulated the population of the available staff at the training center, this was the current best that could be done.

Setting up for the fitness test didn’t take too long with the help of the staff and soon a section of the field was filled with cones and other stuff.

Another part of the fitness test would take place indoors as well.

The fitness test for players consisted of quite a few routines, all with different aims to test the player’s ability to perform in a match.

The things that needed to be checked were Aerobic Endurance, Anaerobic Capacity, Agility and Speed Drills, Strength and Power, Recovery, and Injury History.

The players would start by checking their aerobic endurance by doing the Beep Test and the Yo-Yo intermittent Recovery test.

The Beep Test is comprised of players running between cones at increasing speeds with short rest intervals until they can no longer maintain the pace.

Jason and the other players immediately got to it, shuttling back and forth between cones as fast as their legs could carry them, and by the time they were done with the first training exercise to check their fitness, their legs were already feeling like they had been dropped into the 9th level of hell.

Unfortunately, they had barely just started the fitness test and they soon had to get into the second exercise which was the Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test.

It was quite similar to the Beep test as it also comprised running between cones at progressively increasing speeds with short recovery periods, testing their ability to recover between bursts of activity.

By the time they were done with the Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test, Jason was kinda annoyed as it felt no different from the Beep test and the vitals being monitored were almost the same thing, so it was strange that they were doing the same sort of test twice.

He was going to ask what was the point of the second assessment when he noticed Dr. Luis Pinto overseeing the medical team that was monitoring the vitals of the player and he immediately shut his mouth.

He knew what this sadistic doctor was capable of and did not want to be noticed and given some ‘special tests’.

Jason could only bury his grievances and move to the next fitness test which was the sprint test and was used to check the players’ Anaerobic capacity.

The players were to perform timed sprints over short distances(e.g., 30 meters, 50 meters) to measure their acceleration and short-distance speeds.

There was also another test to measure anaerobic capacity called the Wingate test where players would cycle at maximum effort for a short duration(usually 30 seconds) to determine their peak anaerobic power output, but since this test required cycling, it would be done later when the players went indoors for the fitness tests that needed to be done indoors.

After doing the sprint tests, the players had a few minutes to rest before they headed into the next phase of the fitness test which was agility and speed drills.

For the speed and agility drills, the players would be doing cone drills where they would weave around cones in various patterns, testing their footwork and agility.

They would also do shuttle runs where they would sprint back and forth between lines, mimicking the side-to-side movements during a game.

By the time they were done with the speed and agility drills, Jason was feeling like how one would feel after seventy minutes of a Champions League knockout game.

Of course, Jason had never actually played a game in the Champions League, not even a playoff round, but he strongly believed that what he was feeling would be how would be feeling if he had played seventy minutes of a Champions League knockout round.

Unfortunately, they weren’t done yet as the medical team had decided to incorporate a few more exercises to assess the player’s lower body strength and explosive power even though it was not usually a part of the fitness test.

It seemed the coach really was pulling out all the stops to reevaluate his squad for their return to professional football.

The players headed indoors to one of the gyms where equipment for the last drills would be done.

The players first underwent the Wingate test before moving to the strength drills which comprised of squats with weights and a vertical jump test.

Jason and the rest of the players in his batch did their best to finish the drills before finally collapsing to the ground to rest.

They were finally done with the fitness test and could finally rest for a bit.

Performing all the fitness drills had left them more exhausted than how they would feel if they had played a normal ninety-minute match.

As the injury history of this batch of players was pretty clear, there weren’t any specific fitness exercises that the players had to do, thus, at this point, all they could do was wait for the results.

For some of them however, it wasn’t really necessary as they knew that they had done their best to keep their match fitness even while on break, and thus they were probably as match fit as possible(Jason included), while a few others could only hope that they met the requirements as they had been enjoying their break a little too much and had been called to resume all of a sudden, thus they had been caught off guard.

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