Lower body

Single-leg hop test

Sport is played one leg at a time. This test measures each leg separately — and the gap between them is more informative than either number on its own.

Short answer

Record the weaker leg, not the better one. The single-leg hop measures one-leg power, and the difference between your legs is the finding — a limb difference around 10% is a commonly used threshold in return-to-sport criteria.

Take that to a physiotherapist rather than treating it as a green light on its own.

Single-leg power and landing control, and the left-right asymmetry between them. Record the weaker side: the gap is the point.

Why it is in the Train Smart battery: One-leg power and the left-right gap that predicts injury better than either leg alone.

Protocol

How to run it

One leg, land and stick it on the same leg. Three each side. Record the WEAKER side — the gap between legs is the point.

What you need: A tape measure · A flat non-slip surface

Benchmarks

What is a good score?

We are not going to publish a precise-looking table for this test. Reported ranges vary too much with protocol, equipment, level, age and sex for a single table to be honest, and most of the tables in circulation for it are uncited copies of each other.

The comparison that actually changes your training is against your own last score. That is not a consolation prize — it is what the monitoring literature supports, and it is what Train Smart does: re-test every eight weeks under the same conditions and let the trend, not the percentile, drive the program. The papers behind that are here.

Getting it right

What people get wrong

Most of the variation between two tests is protocol, not fitness. These are the faults that make one score incomparable to the last.

Landing on two feet.: Take off on one leg, land on the same leg, and stick it. A two-foot landing makes the test a different one and removes the control element entirely.
Recording the best leg.: The good leg is not the finding. The weaker one, and the gap, are.
Testing it after a lower-body session.: Asymmetry widens with fatigue, so a fatigued test exaggerates the gap you are trying to measure.

Asymmetry closes by training the sides separately, not together. Split squats, single-leg RDLs, step-ups and single-leg hops — and starting each set with the weaker side, matching the stronger side to it rather than the other way round.

Train Smart programs single-leg work in every sport program for exactly this reason, and the prehab block for landing sports leads with it.

FAQ