Agility refers to your ability to change speed or direction quickly and efficiently, usually in response to something happening around you. If the movement is completely pre-planned, we would more accurately call it change-of-direction training… but in the real world and in sport, the two obviously overlap.
I started coaching sports back in the early ’90s. Tennis and Lacrosse were my two biggest loves, and I not only taught them part-time but competed at county level in tennis at 17, and represented England in Lacrosse at 21.
Both those sports require heaps of agility. I was never a natural athlete… I got good through hours and hours of practice. I remember practising agility three times a week, just going to fields by myself and sprinting randomly, changing direction, sidestepping and repeating. It was also a bit like HIIT training, as I was doing 5–15 seconds of work and then having little breaks.
I didn’t have a clue about the science of agility training. I just tried to replicate what I would do on a tennis court and a lacrosse pitch. Looking back, my agility separated me from a lot of my competitors. While I would train differently now, knowing what I know today, the basic principle behind what I was doing back then was still pretty sound.
Replicating the movement patterns and physical demands of your sport is a key part of training for sport. However, this course is written for non-competitive athletes, and the best thing about not competing is that we don’t have to be quite so specific with our drills; we can focus on becoming a better machine for life and borrow the best and most enjoyable drills from ALL sports!
I’d love to teach you so many fun drills from different sports. For example, the T-Drill was shown to me over 25 years ago to help linebackers change direction quickly — I was an assistant coach at an American Football training camp in New York many moons ago! Well, I used the same drill yesterday with a 61-year-old lady I’m helping to recover from a knee operation.
The British training company, SAQ International, has great courses you can attend. Just because you are not a fitness coach/personal trainer doesn’t mean you can’t study the kind of stuff I studied! It’s terrific fun learning more about the body and movement. Failing that, one of my fave books on the subject is Training for Speed, Agility and Quickness Edited by Lee Brown & JC Santana. It’s about 20 years old now, but it’s still one of the best books I’ve read on this subject and full of illustrated drills. It’s also an excellent resource for outdoor agility games the whole family can play if you have kids.
See you tomorrow for the final pillar.