The Robinson Protocol: a treadmill anaerobic performance test

The current investigation was designed to further examine the reliability of the Robinson protocol, which is a run-to-exhaustion treadmill test. Robinson (10) originally examined this protocol with 5 subjects. The significance of the initial exploratory study was the impetus for expanding the study to examine the reliability of the protocol with a larger sample. Fifteen male subjects participated in 3 trial runs on the treadmill. The first trial was a modified McConnell (7) test to determine the aerobic capacity of each subject. The second and third trials were identical Robinson protocols (10). The first trial run mean, in seconds (262.04 +/- 74.50), was not significantly different from the second trial run mean (257.30 +/- 72.65), p = 0.526 (2 tailed). As expected, trial 1 and trial 2 were highly correlated (intraclass) (r = 0.927, p < 0.001). These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that the Robinson protocol with a greater subject pool is a reliable protocol that can be used in research studies interested in examining various physiological interventions or anaerobic training.