Sprint metrics

Every run gives you a set of numbers. Metric Sprint reads all of them from how your body moves across the gates you placed.

Split times

Each split is the time from the 0 m line to a gate. The splits are cumulative: 0–5 m, 0–10 m and 0–20 m. Lower times are better.

Each distance has its own colour. Metric keeps that colour the same everywhere, so you can read a chart, a pill or a leaderboard without hunting for a legend.

• 0–5 m — your start and first steps. This split is the most sensitive to how you come off the line.
• 0–10 m — acceleration proper.
• 0–20 m — acceleration carried into the beginning of your top-end speed.

One guide to remember is 1-2-3. Your 5 m should be a low 1-something. Your 10 m aims to be under 2.0 s. Your 20 m should be close to 3 s, or below it.

For rough orientation, these are the times male field-sport athletes tend to run from a standing start:

Level	0–5 m	0–10 m	0–20 m
Developing	1.20 s+	2.10 s+	3.60 s+
Club / school	1.10–1.20 s	1.90–2.10 s	3.20–3.60 s
Well-trained	1.00–1.10 s	1.75–1.90 s	3.00–3.20 s
Elite / professional	under 1.00 s	under 1.75 s	under 3.00 s

Treat these as ballpark guidance rather than formal norms. They are a sanity check on where you sit, not a standard to measure yourself against. Expect women’s times to sit roughly 8–12% slower at the same level. Expect junior athletes to sit well outside these ranges until late adolescence.

At the very top end, the fastest 10 m recorded at the MLS combine is 1.61 s. The fastest 20 m at the AFL Draft Combine is 2.75 s. That is the ceiling, not the target.

Your own trend line beats any table. Timing method, surface, footwear and start position shift these numbers more than most athletes expect. A time that looks slow against this table can be good on wet grass in trainers.

Peak velocity

Peak velocity is the fastest your centre of mass travels at any point in the run, in metres per second (m/s).

A set of gates cannot give you this number. Gates report the average speed between two fixed points, which hides where your speed peaked. Metric Sprint tracks you continuously through the entire run, so it reports the velocity of every frame.

Peak velocity is higher the longer a sprint is. To account for this, your progress chart splits peak velocity by 10 m and 20 m runs.

Where the peak falls in the sprint tells you the most. Ideally it lands at the final cone, or very close to it. That means you accelerated through the entire run. Watch for a peak that falls 3 or more metres before the last cone. That peak means you decelerated before the sprint was over, and it cost you time.

The acceleration curve

On a linear sprint, the summary plots speed against distance. You get the shape of the run rather than a single number. The curve shows how sharply you built speed, where it flattened, and whether you were still climbing at the last gate.

On an agility test, the same card plots speed against time and marks each turn. The dips in the trace are your turns. A deep, wide dip means you spent a long time slow. A narrow dip means you got in and out fast.

Agility totals

The 5-0-5 and the 5-10-5 report each leg separately, plus a total. Metric tracks the total as your personal best.

Metric times the 5-0-5 from a standing start, which is the modified version of the test. Published 5-0-5 norms almost always come from the traditional version. That version uses a 10 m flying run-in and times only the 5 m out-and-back. The two protocols are not comparable, and the traditional numbers always look faster. Compare your total against your own history and your roster, not against a table built on a different test.

Ballpark totals for male field-sport athletes, both from Metric’s standing start:

Level	5-0-5 total	5-10-5 total
Developing	3.20 s+	5.60 s+
Club / school	2.90–3.20 s	5.10–5.60 s
Well-trained	2.70–2.90 s	4.60–5.10 s
Elite / professional	under 2.70 s	under 4.60 s

The quality of your footwear and the running surface play a big role here. Poor shoes, dusty courts or wet grass can slow agility performance considerably. That loss is often larger than the gap between two of these bands.

The largest normative review of the 5-0-5 to date pooled 50 studies across 11 sports. It found substantial gaps between groups. Males averaged 6.03% faster than females. Elite males were 7.78% faster than sub-elite and novice males. Sub-elite females were 3.30% faster than novice females. Use sport-, sex- and level-matched reference values wherever you can find them (Ryan, Uthoff, McKenzie & Cronin, 2021).

Related

• Agility turns covers how Metric judges those turns.
• Reading your sprint data covers personal bests, trends and history.