Agility is a highly coveted attribute in sports performance. It can make or break some athletes career’s. Before discussing appropriate implementation, how to train these attributes, how to measure these attributes, it is important to define agility, both planned and reactive. After a quick google search, the first two definitions to come up for agility are “ability to move quickly and easily” and “ability to think and understand quickly”. For me, these definitions also represent the differences between planned and reactive agility.
Thinking about planned agility, I think of a classic cone drill like the box drill. Most coaches and athletes are familiar with this; Sprint to the Cone A, shuffle to adjacent Cone B, back pedal to Cone C, shuffle to Cone D. This drill can assess an athlete’s ability to move quickly and easily, right? However, it requires little to no thought and is usually completed on “autopilot”. Not to say that there is no place for planned agility drills. I believe they can be great for working acceleration, deceleration, and change of direction technique. After building a solid foundation, it is important to move away from these drills once athletes display competence. Beyond that point, continuing to use these drills in hopes of transfer to play would be a disservice to athletes.
Reactive agility involves athletes making a decision based on a given stimulus. This makes room for tons of creativity for a coach, which in turn makes these drills fun and fresh. The progression I tend to use with these reactive drills are vocal command (go, stop, left, right), color command (go to blue, red, yellow, green, etc.), number command (instructed to go/react on evens – “5,7,3,7,9,2,3”), visual cue command (seeing a ball drop, bounce, roll), mirror drills (athletes are in pairs/threes, one is the target, the others mirror the direction and speed in which the target is moving), lastly, athletes moving with multiple stimuli (running while 2-3 athletes change position, requiring the running athlete to adjust their course).
I believe that agility and sprint work gets over-dosed frequently. Just like strength training, speed and agility work can be improved in many ways, some have a higher cost/benefit ratio than others. I like to think of it like this, get the most out of the phone without draining the battery. As we know, speed and agility training is taxing on the central nervous system, and should be programmed efficiently so athletes are not getting burnt out session after session. So whats the right amount? Too many variables are in play to deliver a blanket answer. Being able to evaluate the success of each session and cumulative session gains can help shape an answer for you, in a specific setting with particular athletes. I tend to think less is more in this area. I tend to lean toward work:rest of around 1:6-8 to start, meaning if it takes 10 seconds to complete a drill or exercise, the athlete would rest for 60 seconds. This ensures the athlete is getting high quality reps, in a given capacity. Sets become adjustable based on the goal during the time of competitive year. Volume can be measured by work time or distance. Choosing which one is more appropriate should be based on the type of drills you are using. For me I tend to choose distance when working linearly, and time when working laterally. It is also important to be confident to make changes on the fly when necessary based on athlete response.
In large group settings, it can be difficult to have everyone rest for 60+ seconds without losing the groups focus. To combat this, I will break down groups based on the work:rest I’m looking for. Example, if I have 25 field hockey athletes and we are working off of 1:5, I’ll have 5 go at a time. This approach helps in multiple ways; I know each athlete is getting close to the desired ratio as they have to wait for everyone to go, it allows me to evaluate technique of 5 athletes instead of 25, we can work in smaller spaces, and because they are in 5 smaller groups distraction is limited.
Measuring agility can be difficult, especially when looking at the “ability to think and understand quickly” side. One way to look into testing and retesting this side of agility is to involve some sort of skill within the drill. An example of this would be dribbling a soccer ball through a drill. This method is still limited, but the athlete must react to the outside stimulus (ball) while they are completing a course that requires the expression of acceleration, deceleration, and change of direction. Being able to time this and work on improving that timing may indicate that the athlete is moving in the right direction. Its speculation, but no one is going to complain about being faster while demonstrating improvement in skill (ball control).
All in all, these are my thoughts on agility, and how I implement it into my sports performance programming. Thank you for reading this post. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this. Comment below to add to the conversation.
Sports Performance Thoughts 