About this site
About Two-Minute Cycle
Two-Minute Cycle is an independent practice site for the ACLS exam. It is not the American Heart Association (AHA), and it cannot give you a card: only an AHA Training Center or AHA instructor can issue the card. What it does give you is practice cards and study pages written to the 2025 AHA Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care.
Readers
Who this site is for
This site is for people who already work in healthcare and have an ACLS course on the calendar: usually physicians and residents, emergency, ICU, telemetry and OR nurses, paramedics, respiratory therapists, CRNAs, NPs, PAs and pharmacists. Most of them arrive the same way. They have not run a code in months, the drug sequence feels loose, and the course is next week. That is the normal starting point, not a warning sign.
The useful first move is small. Take the precourse self-assessment practice, since you need 70% on the real one before class, then read the explanations for the cards you missed.
Cards
Where the practice cards come from
The questions start in the bank of our iPhone app, which holds 1,447 ACLS practice questions. They are our own writing. They are not AHA material, and they are not questions from the real exam.
01Picked from the app bank
174 questions were chosen for this site, spread across seven topic areas so that every part of the course gets practice.
02Answered blind
Each one was worked out without looking at its answer key, and kept only when the worked answer matched the key. Questions where two answers could both be argued were left out.
03Checked against 2025
Questions written to older guidance, such as a drug step or temperature target that has since changed, were dropped. What is left follows the 2025 AHA Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care.
04Explained on the back
Every card turns over to show why the keyed answer is right and, where it matters, why the most tempting wrong answer is wrong.
The 60-card practice test is the quickest way to see the whole set in one sitting.
2025
How the pages stay accurate
The course moved to the 2025 AHA Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care, released on October 22, 2025, and instructors had to be on the new materials by March 1, 2026. Every page here is written to that version. A few habits keep it honest:
How to read the pages on this site
- usually, about
- Reported by AHA Training Centers, not printed on an AHA page. Confirm it with your instructor.
- Our estimate
- Our split of the seven topic areas on the topic bars. The AHA does not publish topic weights for the ACLS exam.
- Flowcharts
- Drawn by us from the Guidelines text. We do not copy AHA algorithm diagrams or provider manual text.
- Checked October 2026
- The month a fact was last compared with its source.
- A number we could not confirm
- Left out. The page describes the decision instead.
Names
The name, and the AHA's name
The name comes from the rhythm of a resuscitation: about two minutes of compressions between rhythm checks, over and over. The site borrows that rhythm for studying, in short sets you can repeat.
The American Heart Association and ACLS are named here only to say which course the practice is for. Two-Minute Cycle has no affiliation with the AHA, is not endorsed by it and is not an AHA Training Center. We do not issue, renew or speed up a card, and finishing our practice tests is not a course. For a course, start at the AHA ACLS course options page (opens the AHA site).
Start with ten cards
You do not need a plan to begin. Ten cards on this site, a look at the explanation for each miss, and you will know which page to open next.