Change of direction training: On the field and in the gym

Agility is “a rapid whole body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus” [1]. Therefore, change of direction (COD) actions are part of an agility task, but can also be part of movements where the athlete does not need to react to a stimulus [1]. The critical difference, then, is that cognitive and perceptual demands influence agility performance. The total number of COD activities per match varies quite widely across the different studies examining this questions, ranging from 11.9 hard changes of direction to more than 700 turns and swerves [2-7]. Our interest i...