An essential guide to agility training

Content of essentials article

• Defining agility
• Differences between agility and change of direction
• Testing agility
• Limitations of agility testing
• Training agility
• Physical training
• Technical and cognitive training
• Building an agility program

Defining agility

Agility is one of the most difficult physical qualities to define. The sport science and coaching literature have not helped the confusion, considering how many terms they’ve intermingled with agility: change of direction, multi-directional speed, quickness and cutting, to name a few ^[13].

One of the most widely used definitions of agility is “a rapid whole body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus’’ ^[13].

A key element of this definition is the requirement to react to a stimulus. This characteristic distinguishes agility from movements where a new direction of travel is completely pre-planned. An example of a pre-planned change of direction is running bases in baseball or softball: the batter knows the direction and angle they need to travel. These pre-planned actions fall under the umbrella of change-of-direction (COD) ability.

Our definition of agility is general and somewhat vague, as it is not clear what “stimulus” means. A clearer and more practical way to understand agility is to identify how athletes actually perform it in sports.

For example, in combat sports such as boxing or mixed martial arts, athletes need agility to evade an attempted punch or kick from an opponent. In sports where the court is divided in half by a net (e.g. tennis, table tennis, badminton, volleyball), players must move and react to their opponent’s shots in an effort to make a return. Invasion sports include all codes of football, as well as basketball, handball, netball, field and ice hockey, lacrosse, and water polo. These sports require agility to stop suddenly or redirect the body in reaction to many varied situations. A misdirected pass from a teammate or an unpredictable bounce of a ball are examples of stimuli that players may need to react to and change their motion.

For invasion sports, agility may be most critical to individual and team success when possession is in dispute, a situation known as a contest.

When an attacking player travels down the field or court, they will be confronted by one or more opposition defenders who aim to dispossess them. The attacker may choose to pass to a teammate or evade opponents, both with the purpose of progressing towards the goal and creating scoring opportunities. When attempting to evade, the attacker needs to react to opponents’ movements, and may either decelerate or perform a change of direction to the left or right.

The ultimate aim of an evasive agility manoeuvre is to create time and space to either pass to a teammate effectively, or to create scoring opportunities.

In the same evasive scenario, a player from the defending team also requires agility. They must react to the attacker’s evasive attempts and move to either corral, block, tackle or pressure the attacker with the aim of achieving a turnover of possession.

Evasive agility actions are an exciting and important feature of many sports, and therefore exploring how to develop agility skill is a valuable pursuit for the coach.

Differences between agility and COD ability

Agility requires a change of motion in response to a stimulus, often provided by the actions of opponents.

In many sports, teams will practise set pieces, where player paths are pre-planned, in an attempt to achieve a positive outcome for the team. Despite these rehearsed strategies, any ensuing agility manoeuvre can not be completely pre-planned. Both attackers and defenders may need to react suddenly and unpredictably, and they may need to perform their final movement at a speed, angle, and with a technique that they craft in the moment.

Some agility scenarios force players to execute a movement or movements that they have never performed before, improvising to evade or to prevent evasion.

In contrast, COD ability tasks are performed with prior knowledge of the new direction of travel and when it will occur. This enables the athlete to select a technique, e.g., sidestep, and practise it before performing the skill in a competitive situation.

	Agility	COD ability
Stimulus to change direction	Yes	No
Approach speed before change of direction	Unpredictable	Predictable
New direction of travel	Unpredictable	Known
Exact technique used to change direction	Unpredictable	Known
Number of maneuvers	Unpredictable	Known
Exact time when change of direction required	Unpredictable	Known
Common in team sports	Yes	No

What does the research say?

In addition to the different characteristics of agility and COD ability, research has quantified the dissimilarity between these qualities. Several studies have assessed the same athletes on tests that require the same movement pathway, with the only difference being an unplanned change of direction reacting to a stimulus -(agility) and a planned change of direction (COD ability) ^{[5, 6, 11, 12, 14]}.

In all studies, the correlation between the two tests was less than 0.71, which means the shared variance (common characteristics) was less than 50%. This provides statistical evidence that agility and COD ability are independent or specific skills ^[16].

Research focussing on sidestepping mechanics has also shown that when athletes react to a stimulus to move either to the left or right, their technique for the agility manoeuvre is significantly different than a pre-planned sidestep ^{[2, 7, 15]}. This suggests that the difference between agility and COD ability can be explained by both decision-making (cognitive) and technical factors.

Testing agility

Testing athletes lets coaches monitor the effects of training, identify individual strengths and weaknesses (athlete profiling), or identify talent. Testing is also required to research practical questions of interest to coaches.

Historically, tasks described as agility tests have actually assessed COD ability, not agility. They typically require the athlete to negotiate poles, cones, or lines marked on the ground, which direct the change or changes of direction. Examples include the Illinois agility test, Pro agility test, 505 test, and T agility test.

The likely reason that COD ability tests have been so widely used to represent agility are their ease of use: they require little equipment, are fast to conduct, and historical normative data is available ^[19]. 

Given the differences we’ve already discussed between agility and COD ability, coaches should not use COD ability tests to represent agility performance.

More recently, agility tests that are more representative of the agility demands of different sports have started to emerge. The stimulus presented to the athlete to direct a change of direction is provided by either a human sidestep, a video projection of an athlete changing direction, or flashing lights (Table 2).

Stimulus	Typical characteristics	Attacking or defending
1. Human	Tester performs sidestep, athlete moves to the left or right at 45°	Defending
2. Human	Athlete attempts to evade tester to cross end line. Movement can be in varied directions	Defending and attacking assessed separately
3. Video projection of attacker changing direction	Athlete moves to the left or right at a prescribed angle	Defending
4. Flashing lights	Athlete moves at various angles to prescribed positions	Not applicable

Some agility tests simply measure total movement time, but others have isolated the reaction time and decision accuracy, which add value by providing information about athletes’ decision-making capabilities.

What does the research say?

Unlike most COD ability tests, agility tests have been validated because higher standard athlete groups (e.g., elite athletes) perform better in the tests than their lower standard counterparts ^{[6, 14, 18]}.

High performing team sport athletes have the ability to select relevant kinematic cues from opponents to quickly and accurately anticipate opponents actions in agility situations ^{[8, 20]}. That makes the presence of a sport specific stimulus (human or video) preferable to using flashing lights because the sport specific stimulus has better ecological validity, that is, real world relevance ^[8].

Limitations of agility tests

Despite the presence of valid and reliable agility tests, coaches have not yet widely adopted them; nor do researchers use them as extensively as you might expect.

A few limitations could explain these disparities.

1. They typically only represent defensive agility. The instruction given to athletes is typically to run towards the stimulus as if pursuing an attacker in possession of a ball. Research has shown that defending and attacking agility are independent or specific skills ^{[4, 17]}, likely due to differences in perceptual information (cognitive) and the techniques the athletes use ^[10].
2. Agility tests measure the time to cover a certain path (e.g., Y shape), usually via electronic timing lights. Therefore, athletes are instructed to run as fast as possible to minimise their time. This strategy of always running at maximum speed is not how they would necessarily perform agility actions in competition. For example, Rayner ^[10] found that in professional Australian Rules football, about 80% of agility actions were performed at sub-maximum speed.
3. Although current agility tests use a variety of techniques and footwork, they do not represent the movement variability that occurs in match play. This is especially true for “360°” sports such as soccer, Australian Rules, or Gaelic football, where players and ball movement are varied and unpredictable.
4. The information players perceive about their opponent’s actions is important for anticipating and responding appropriately in an agility scenario. In competition, some agility contests involve approaching opponents from the front, the rear or at an angle. Further, when an attacker is in possession of the ball, the relevant information is different than what it is for a player without the ball. Many agility tests do not involve deceptive actions such as fake steps or passes, which are quite common in some sports ^[10]. Therefore, most agility tests do not represent the variety of visual information found in competition.

A relatively new test that simulates a 1v1 agility contest in Australian Rules football and rugby addresses these limitations ^{[4, 17]}. This test is unique because the outcome is based on the separation from opponents, which is more aligned to the objective of agility in invasion sports for both attackers and defenders, rather than covering a prescribed path in the shortest possible time.

This 1v1 test is not without its own limitations:

• It is time consuming to conduct multiple trials for attacking and for defending.
• The scoring requires judgement about the space between players and whether they were touched, which are best conducted with video recording and playback.
• All players in a squad must be tested against the same opponent or opponents (testers), who should be of a similar standard. This is the only way to compare scores between players in a team. This procedure also means that scores are dependent on tester capabilities. Therefore, normative results are not possible.
• Decision making is only based on the actions of a single opponent. In a game, the positions of other players in close proximity to the contest also need to be taken into account. For example, an attacker may choose to perform a deceptive action, like fake a pass to a teammate. A potential way to overcome this could be to assess agility in 3v3 or 5v5 small-sided games. Such games can accurately simulate the agility demands of competition. Even so, we still need a testing methodology that can achieve a valid and reliable assessment.

Training agility

Three key components influence agility: physical, technical, and cognitive ^[16]. Although the S&C coach should be comfortable designing programs for physical development, they should also address the technical and cognitive components to optimise their impact on athlete and team performance. The coach should also consider the context they are working in, taking into account the demands of their sport and needs of individual athletes.

For example, one athlete might be powerful and display efficient technique, but be a poor decision maker. In contrast, another athlete might possess fast and accurate decisions (good thinker) but lack the athleticism and technical execution (poor mover).

It is important to appreciate that decision making and movement are inextricably linked. What the athlete perceives (e.g., an opponent’s actions) will influence the specific agility movement strategy that athlete performs. This “perception-action coupling” tells us that agility training should not emphasise or focus on isolated techniques out of context from the competitive environment ^[1]. An exception is when programming isolated techniques like sidestepping or hard decelerations in order to produce a physical training stimulus.

Physical training

The S&C coach should understand the muscular force requirements of agility manoeuvres to gain insight into what strength training approaches are likely to be beneficial. Since the capacity to decelerate can be important for agility, high levels of eccentric force production are desirable, particularly in the leg muscles. Traditional strength training should build an eccentric strength base through exercises like back squats, or with flywheel devices that overload the eccentric phase of a lift.

A specific way to develop eccentric strength and power is to simply execute hard decelerations. The eccentric loading can be gradually increased over time by using progressively faster forward runs before attempting to stop quickly. An example of a drill for a large number of team sport athletes is using a whistle to signal the players to transition from backward to forward running. By instructing athletes to change to backward running as soon as possible after the sound of a whistle, they enhance the intent to decelerate maximally to stop.

Sidestepping is a common agility technique for attackers to create separation from opponents. The foot is planted to one side to apply a lateral force to the ground, which propels the athlete to the opposite side. Once the foot is planted, the leg bends to lower the body and the leg extensor muscles (e.g. quadriceps) act eccentrically as the tissues are stretched. This is followed by an extension of the leg and concentric muscle force production (shortening) to propel the whole body in a new direction of travel. This stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) of muscle contraction requires a high level of reactive strength, especially when the athlete is moving at high speed or attempting a large directional change e.g. 90° or greater ^[3].

Plyometric methods are effective for developing reactive strength ^[9], with a variety of exercises available to the coach. Reactive strength qualities can be developed with general exercises that are bilateral and vertically oriented, like hurdle jumps or drop jumps.

Instruct athletes to rebound for maximum height and to minimise the ground contact time. Since the height the athlete falls from influences the eccentric or stretch load imposed on the leg muscles, the coach should carefully monitor hurdle or box height to achieve an overload that is safe and effective.

Developing reactive strength specific to agility requires an analysis of the particular techniques that are used in your sport. For example, sidesteps are common in football codes ^[10], and back pedalling and side shuffling are more common in basketball.

Lateral bounding – which is unilateral and horizontal – in a zig-zag pattern simulates the leg muscle function in a sidestep rather well. Since the SSC in agility involves ground contact times between 0.16 – 0.05 sec ^[3], coaches should be sure to select plyometric exercises that span this range, and that they can easily monitor with contact mats or video recordings.

Technical and cognitive training

To retain perception-action coupling, coaches should focus on activities that require agility movements in response to opponents’ actions. With this approach, we can develop the technical and cognitive components simultaneously and produce a better transfer to competition performance.

1. 1v1 contest. The principle is to simulate a contest in competition where an attacker in possession of the ball attempts to evade a defender, while the defender aims to shadow, block or tackle the attacker. Both players need to find the movement solution to achieve their respective goals. Progressions from least to most demanding are:
2. The defender or both players are only allowed to walk or jog to provide more time for decision making as well as limiting the physical loading. No deceptive actions, like fake steps, are allowed.
3. Both players are allowed to move at a self-selected speed (no restrictions), but no deceptive actions allowed.
4. Both players can move at a self-selected speed and the attacker can use deceptive actions during evasion.
5. A second attacker is introduced (1v2) to allow for deceptive fake passes, with the defender tracking the player in possession (increased cognitive load). Coaches can methodically vary the starting positions to create different approach speeds and angles. 

Some advantages of this 1v1 activity are:

• Develops both attacking and defending agility skill.
• The first progression allows a greater emphasis on technical execution with a low cognitive demand, making it suitable for less experienced athletes.
• Players can select a variety of agility techniques to suit the situation. For example, a split step technique is more suitable at slower speeds.
• Attackers can practice their deceptive actions and defenders can practice reading them to improve decision accuracy.
• Perceptual information is varied, e.g. the athlete has a front-on or angled view.

• Small-sided games (SSG). The coach selects the rules, number of players in each team (usually 3-5), and the field size and shape to suit the objectives of the session. To encourage more evasion at slower speeds, the field should be more dense, that is, have less space per player. Modify the rules to encourage evasion by limiting the number of consecutive passes allowed.

Some advantages of SSG for agility are:

• As well as targeting agility development, they develop other sport skills, fitness, and team tactics at the same time.
• SSG maximise specificity to competition, and therefore can be expected to provide good transfer.
• Athletes can practice a large variety of agility manoeuvres.
• With more players around a contest, the decision making is more complex. An attacker has more options when considering deceptive actions, providing the defender greater unpredictability.
• SSGs encourage creativity of movement, so athletes can learn what strategy works for them in certain situations according to their strengths.

Let this be the stimulus to build an agility training program

Agility is a complex skill with a physical, technical and cognitive component. A holistic training program needs to improve each of these components in order to improve an athlete’s agility.

Coaches should view agility according to the objectives in the sport, such as evading defenders or nullifying attackers.

Unlike change of direction and pre-planned movements, agility requires movement in response to a stimulus. Therefore, you should not expect simple COD drills to readily transfer to agility in competition. Fortunately, there are many agility tests to choose from, so coaches can consider the demands of the sport and individual, as well as the value of the test result, time and effort required to conduct the test.