How to Run the RAST: Running-Based Anaerobic Sprint Test Protocol

A field hockey coach messaged me last month asking whether there was any way to get Wingate-style anaerobic numbers without eight thousand dollars of lab equipment her club's budget couldn't cover for a third straight year. The answer she'd been circling without knowing its name is the Running-based Anaerobic Sprint Test: six maximal 35-meter sprints, a stopwatch or a pair of budget photocell gates, and a bathroom scale. Draper and Whyte built it in 1997 to solve exactly this problem — field-sport coaches needed a power output measure that didn't require athletes to pedal a fixed-resistance flywheel they'd never use in competition. It isn't a perfect substitute for the Wingate; nothing running-based recruits muscle in quite the same pattern as a braked cycle ergometer. But for athletes whose job is to sprint, not pedal, RAST gives you power numbers in the movement pattern that actually produced them.

What RAST Actually Measures

RAST is six all-out 35-meter sprints separated by 10 seconds of active recovery. A single sprint tells you almost nothing about fatigue resistance — you need the decay curve across repeated efforts to see how an athlete's anaerobic system holds up under load. From the six sprint times, the protocol derives four numbers that track the Wingate's core outputs almost metric for metric:

• Peak Power (PP): the highest power output, produced during whichever sprint is fastest — usually sprint 1 or 2, before fatigue and phosphocreatine depletion slow the athlete down.
• Minimum Power (MP): the lowest power output, almost always sprint 5 or 6.
• Average Power (AP): the mean of the six power values, a rough proxy for total anaerobic work capacity across the roughly 90-second window — six sprints plus five 10-second recoveries.
• Fatigue Index (FI): the rate of power decline, expressed in watts per second rather than the Wingate's percentage figure — worth remembering before comparing an athlete's number against a table built for the other test.

Draper and Whyte (1997) chose the 35m distance deliberately: short enough that most field-sport athletes hit top velocity within it, but long enough — roughly 5 to 7 seconds for most athletes — that the sprint draws meaningfully on glycolytic contribution instead of staying a pure alactic effort the way a 10m sprint would.

Energy System Physiology Behind the Six Sprints

The physiology is close to identical to the Wingate's, just distributed across six discrete efforts instead of one continuous 30-second bout. The first sprint draws overwhelmingly on phosphocreatine breakdown — at 5 to 7 seconds of near-maximal sprinting, PCr stores are only beginning to be taxed, which is why sprint 1 nearly always produces peak power in athletes who haven't been coached into pacing themselves.

The 10-second recovery between sprints is the protocol's most important, and most misunderstood, design choice. Ten seconds is nowhere near enough for full PCr resynthesis — that takes 3 to 5 minutes at rest — but it's roughly enough to resynthesize half of what was depleted. That deliberate incomplete recovery is what forces glycolysis to contribute progressively more from sprint 2 onward, and it's why the power decrement across sprints 1 through 6 traces a curve structurally similar to a single 30-second Wingate effort — the same PCr-to-glycolytic handoff, compressed into a stepped format instead of a continuous one.

By sprints 5 and 6, rising hydrogen ion concentration and lactate accumulation are measurably impairing calcium reuptake and cross-bridge cycling — the same fatigue mechanisms behind the back half of a Wingate curve. The practical difference is that RAST's fatigue signal is also confounded by running mechanics changing under fatigue, in a way cycling on a fixed flywheel isn't. A tired athlete's stride shortens and ground contact time lengthens; a cycle ergometer doesn't let that variable move at all.

Equipment, Track Setup, and Body Mass

You need four things: a flat, non-slip 35m surface — a track or firm turf, not loose sand or wet grass, which slow times enough to distort the power calculation — two timing gates or a reliable stopwatch operator, marking cones at 0m and 35m, and a calibrated scale.

Photocell gates are strongly preferred over hand timing. Because the power formula cubes the time value, small timing errors compound fast — a 0.1-second error on a 5.5-second sprint, about 1.8% of true time, translates into roughly a 5 to 6% error in calculated power. Hand timing carries 0.2 to 0.3 seconds of reaction-time error, enough to shift reported peak power by 10% or more between sessions — enough to erase a real training effect, or manufacture a fake one.

Record body mass to the nearest 0.1kg immediately before testing, in whatever footwear the athlete will sprint in. The formula uses body mass directly, so a heavier training shoe than last session introduces noise you can't later separate from a genuine fitness change.

Step-by-Step RAST Protocol

Warm-up (10–12 minutes): 5 minutes of light jogging, dynamic mobility for hips and ankles, then 3–4 progressive strides building to roughly 90% of perceived maximal speed over 20–30m, with full recovery between each. Athletes who skip the strides and go straight from static stretching into an all-out sprint 1 routinely post their season's worst peak power reading — the neuromuscular system needs those near-maximal primer efforts first.

1. Set up 30cm behind the start line in a two-point or three-point stance. Standardize this across sessions — a rolling start versus a static start can shift sprint 1 time by several tenths of a second on its own.
2. On the starter's command, sprint maximally through the 35m gate. Run through, not to, the finish line; decelerating before the timing beam understates true velocity.
3. Walk back to the start line during the 10-second recovery window. Jogging back eats into recovery time and produces a milder fatigue reading at sprint 6 than intended.
4. Repeat for six total sprints, recording each time to the nearest 0.01 second.
5. Verbal encouragement matters as much here as in a Wingate. Athletes who know sprints 5 and 6 are coming tend to unconsciously pace sprints 1 and 2 — a loud, consistent countdown for every sprint reduces that effect.

Cool-down: 5–10 minutes of easy jogging or walking. Full recovery from six maximal sprints with only 10-second rest periods usually takes longer than athletes expect — build in at least an hour before any subsequent high-intensity work that session.

Calculating Power Output and Fatigue Index

Power for each individual sprint: P (W) = (Body Mass (kg) × Distance² (m)) / Time³ (s).

A 75kg athlete running sprint 1 in 5.2 seconds: P = (75 × 35²) / 5.2³ = (75 × 1225) / 140.6 ≈ 654W. If that athlete's slowest sprint — typically sprint 6 — comes in at 6.4 seconds: P = (75 × 1225) / 262.1 ≈ 350W.

With PP ≈ 654W, MP ≈ 350W, and a total six-sprint time of 34.8 seconds: FI = (654 − 350) / 34.8 ≈ 8.7 W/s. This W/s format is the original Draper and Whyte unit. Some later papers, including Zagatto, Beck, and Gobatto's (2009) validation study, report a percentage-based fatigue index instead, calculated the Wingate way: [(PP − MP) / PP] × 100. Know which version a table is using before comparing an athlete's number against it — mixing the two units is a common, easy-to-miss error.

Interpreting Results and Classification Ranges

Zagatto, Beck, and Gobatto (2009, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research) tested RAST against Wingate peak power and 50m sprint performance in a sample of physically active male university students, reporting a strong correlation between RAST and Wingate peak power output — roughly r = 0.85–0.90 — which supports RAST as a reasonable field alternative for tracking anaerobic power trends. Correlation with actual 50m sprint time was more modest, and that matters practically: a high RAST peak power score doesn't automatically predict a fast competitive sprint time, since start technique and race-specific pacing aren't captured by six 35m repeats with 10-second breaks.

Commonly cited classification ranges — compiled across applied field-testing references rather than one peer-reviewed source, so treat them as directional, not diagnostic — place relative peak power above roughly 9–10 W/kg as strong for trained field-sport athletes, 7–9 W/kg as average, and below 6 W/kg as a target for development. A fatigue index under roughly 6 W/s is generally considered solid repeated-sprint resilience; above 10 W/s suggests sharp fatigue across repeated efforts, which matters far more for repeat-sprint sports — soccer, field hockey, basketball — than for single-effort events like the 100m.

Because Zagatto and colleagues' sample was university physical education students rather than elite athletes, and no large multi-sport normative dataset for RAST exists at the scale the Wingate has, treat any classification table — including the ranges above — as a starting reference to refine against your own athletes' baseline numbers, not a fixed cutoff.

Coaching Applications, Common Errors, and Limitations

RAST's real value shows up in longitudinal tracking, same as any anaerobic field test. Run it at the start of a block, then again after 6–8 weeks, and look for the pattern the block was designed to produce. A block built around maximal sprint mechanics should move peak power; one built around repeated-sprint conditioning should move fatigue index down more than it moves peak power.

Errors that quietly wreck test-retest comparisons:

• Switching timing methods between sessions — stopwatch one month, photocells the next. The bias this introduces is often larger than the real training effect you're trying to detect.
• Testing on a different surface, indoor one session and outdoor the next. Surface friction alone can shift power values by 5–10%.
• Not standardizing recovery. Jogging back instead of walking changes rest duration and produces a milder fatigue index than intended.
• Testing fatigued athletes without accounting for it. RAST run 24–48 hours after a heavy sprint session shows depressed peak power that has nothing to do with real regression.

The clearest limitation is also its main selling point: RAST measures running-specific anaerobic power, exactly its advantage over the Wingate for field-sport athletes, but it can't isolate a single muscle group the way a force plate can, and it can't tell you why fatigue index came out high — mechanical breakdown, PCr depletion, and poor pacing all produce the same number on paper. Pairing RAST with sprint mechanics data closes that gap.