SMITH'S FITNESS
FAQ
Eight questions people ask before they start.
Eight questions people ask before they start.
No. Every speed comes from your own week 1 test, so the program meets you where you are. The lookup tables run from 4:00 to 8:00, which covers everyone from an international back to a club front rower in their first pre-season.
Testing is not training. A full Bronco costs you roughly three days of quality work and teaches you nothing you did not already know. You test in week 1 to set your speeds and in week 8 to see whether it worked. In between you train.
A field with 60 m of clear running plus a marked 100 m straight, six cones and a stopwatch. No GPS, no heart rate monitor, no gym. Set the cones once and leave them.
Yes, and you should. Put lifting on separate days where you can; if it has to be the same day, leave at least 6 hours and lift first. Two heavy, short lower-body sessions a week. Do not add extra plyometrics on top — BRAKES & BOUNCE is already 24 minutes a week of high-intensity eccentric work.
Flat, dry grass, in the footwear you will test in. Artificial turf is fine if that is what you have. Avoid wet or frozen ground — the turns are where you will slip, and 29 of them is a lot of chances. Do not swap surfaces between the two tests or you are measuring the ground, not yourself.
The program targets 5%, or about 15 seconds off a 5:00. Athletes with a lower training age or a slower starting time routinely beat that. Anything under 2.4% cannot be distinguished from the measurement error of the test.
Recalculate BAS and MAS from your new time and run the block again. Everything gets faster because your reference speeds moved. Most players get a second, smaller improvement from a repeat block before they need a different stimulus.
The Bronco comes from rugby, but the qualities it measures — aerobic ceiling, repeated change of direction, braking and tolerance for a hard five minutes — are the same in football, hockey, netball, AFL and sevens. If your sport tests the Bronco, this works.