The minimum effective testing battery for tactical athletes
By Joe Dzubak — RD, CSCS, TSAC-F
Commander's TL;DR
Test what changes decisions: structural strength, capacity under load, and one job-specific task. Everything else is optional until those are stable.
Testing batteries fail by addition. Every extra test costs training time, scheduling friction, and analysis debt. The battery survives only if each test maps to a programming decision.
Our default: a lower-body strength index, an upper-body strength index, a loaded capacity test, and one occupational task standard. Four numbers, each with a threshold and a prescribed response.
Run it quarterly, chart it on one page, and let the trend — not the single data point — drive the adjustment.
Put this into practice.
Free self-assessment across the five VROS domains.
Related reading.
You don't have a data problem. You have a decision problem.
Most units and athletes already collect more data than they use. The bottleneck is the absence of a system that converts numbers into a Monday-morning decision. VROS exists to close that gap.
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