You may never coach a Michael Jordon, but any player can benefit from proper agility training.

There may be no more beautiful sight in basketball than an athlete moving his or her body smoothly through the air in gravity-defying control. The complex act, for example, of a player spinning past one defender, head-faking to throw off another, driving under the basket, and sinking an underhand layup will always bring the crowd to its feet and leave the opposition shaking their heads in wonder. To the basketball coach, however, such a performance is an example of the ultimate in agility.

Though athletes and coaches strive to achieve such agility, it is a skill that is not successfully incorporated into most training programs. In fact, agility is perhaps the most misunderstood and undertrained quality of sport. As we develop more sophisticated conditioning equipment and training programs, our drive for quantification inevitably lures us into linear measurements. But agility defies us--it is not a linear, easy-to-measure quality.

The above example describes an athlete performing a complex chain of skills which starts with basic strength combined with simple balance and ends with a great performance on game day. Unfortunately, most agility development work fails to mirror the chain of skills--from the simplest to the most complex--which comprise agility. The work becomes a junk pile of out-of-sequence drills with no sense of the objective.

To exasperate the situation, agility training is mainly incorporated into the preseason (often as work capacity development) and then eliminated once the season rolls around. At the very time when the skill needs to be perfected and specified, players are spending most of their practice time scrimmaging.

In addition to the lack of focus on agility training, many coaches still hold the myth that agility simply can't be taught. I've heard a number of coaches say, "You can't teach what God bestows on the gifted." The truth is that agility can be enhanced at any level, and with any player.

Even for the athlete who will never make that beautiful, gravity-defying move and bring the crowd to its feet, agility training has many benefits. The first is the remarkable improvement in athleticism it brings. Since the primary message agility training teaches the athlete is body control, the results are a concentrated form of kinesthetic awareness. Even the tall, gawky player learns to feel his or her footwork--to know without being coached when he or she puts too much pressure on the little toe rather than the big toe. Athletes who incorporate effective, consistent agility programs into their training often talk of the stunning gains in athleticism, no matter what the sport.

This ushers in the next benefit of agility training: the ability to manage injuries. Agility training improves athletic injury management and divides injuries into the following three component parts:

1. 1)      Prehab: This entails preparing the body for the movements which can occur in a sport that may result in injury. For example, ankle injuries often occur in basketball when a player comes down awkwardly on the foot after a complicated move. By simulating that same movement under low stress conditions in practice, the body becomes better prepared for the movement and injuries can be reduced.
2. 2)      Injury Control: We often refer to certain athletes as "injury prone," while others seem to always avoid injury. Being injury prone, however, is not just a result of bad luck. Athletes with greater agility skills are often able to control the potential injury as it happens. For example, when a player on defense prepares to take an offensive charge, the player may be able to better prepare his or her body for that hit and avoid a potential injury if he or she has superior balance and agility. By possessing the ability to control the body during that critical moment of contact, injury can often be avoided.
3. 3)      Faster Rehab: When athletes practice agility, they learn neurological awareness--and are thus better able to understand the subtle movements of their bodies. The rehab process can then proceed much more rapidly if the injured athlete possesses such neurological awareness. The athlete who is sensitive to angles of the body and has a motor education can read his or her body as it reacts to treatment better than the athlete who has little feel for the process.

Still another benefit of agility training is improved velocity of movement. Agility training teaches the intricacies of synchronizing muscle firing and of controlling minute shifts in ankle, knee, hip, back, shoulder, and neck joints for the best possible postural alignment. Rather than "just doing it" when attempting to move faster, the kinesthetically aware athlete has a series of adjustments to make. Agility training brings a sense of control to the task of moving faster, and helps the process make sense for an otherwise frustrated athlete. This is true especially for the "uncoordinated" athlete, who learns more about him- or herself through agility training than does the genetically gifted. The work on balance, twisting, turning, and catching greatly improves the motor education of any athlete with slow speed and uncoordinated movement.

A final benefit of agility training is that it is long-lasting. It doesn't tend to evaporate like speed, strength, or stamina training. Consider the elderly person who remembers how to ride a bicycle--50 years since last getting on one as a youth. Agility training acts like a tattoo upon muscle memory.

So what exactly is agility, and how do we achieve it through training? Although it may be defined several different ways, I prefer to think of agility as a form of body awareness in motion--the ability to execute fast and fluid movements and the skill to stop and start rapidly, often with the focus on the ball or another athlete. Training agility then involves breaking down such skills into their basic components and learning them in controlled practices--for instance, having the athlete practice uncontested bounce passes while standing on a balance beam (that is low to the ground). It utilizes such simple drills as tag games to teach visual recognition, quickness, stopping, starting, and body control. And it can be enhanced even with limited amounts of time.

Everything learned athletically occurs in stages. (A push shot advances to a jump shot which is followed by long-range shooting.) Agility works the same way. There are four stages to agility--balance, coordination, programmable agility, and random agility. And even though the stages are subtle in difference, often overlapping in transitions from stage A to B or from B to C, understanding each stage helps to simplify the teaching and learning process. Many coaches and athletes want to spend their time training at the top of the agility skill level--by practicing game-like situations. However, spending time at the basic levels may be more worthwhile.

Since agility development is based upon strength (because the human body must exert force to overcome inertia and gravity), strength training is a prerequisite to agility training. However, strength for agility is considerably broader than the narrow confines of the weight room, with its emphasis on up and down resistance from gravity. For agility, strengthening the core of the body is important. This can be accomplished with medicine ball training, especially exercises that call for throwing the ball at multiple angles.

Once a solid strength base is achieved, actual agility training may begin. The first stage of learning agility involves training balance, the foundation of athleticism. In this stage we teach the ability to stand, walk, and stop by focusing on the center of gravity, posture, and foot placement. It doesn't take long to train balance--just a few minutes a day, a couple of times per week, with most of the emphasis placed early in the practice/workout session, and early in the training season. Examples of balance drills are: standing or walking on a balance beam (a two-by-four works well), standing on tennis balls, standing on one foot and moving the other leg in full range-of-motion, walking backwards with eyes closed, and jumping onto a mini trampoline then freezing.

The second stage of agility is to combine balance and coordination. Such coordination work is often quite slow and methodical, with an emphasis on correct biomechanics during athletically demanding movements. A large part of coordination work is performed by breaking a skill down into parts, then slowly uniting the parts. Typical coordination activities include tumbling, rolling, footwork drills, and plyometric jumps. More difficult examples are: walking on a balance beam while playing catch, trotting along a line while your partner lightly pushes and pulls you off, and jumping on and off a K-board (a kind of balance board) while holding a medicine ball in different positions.

The third stage of agility training is programmable agility. When the athlete knows the skill and stress placed upon him or her, and also knows the pattern and sequence of demands, the athlete knows the "program." Programmable agility drills are often characterized by high speeds, although they are learned at low, controlled speeds. One example is the "T" shuttle, which involves changes of direction along a known, standardized pattern. Once these types of drills are learned, they can be performed against the clock; times should improve with advances in strength, explosion, dynamic flexibility, and body control.

The pinnacle of agility preparation and performance comes in the fourth stage, random agility. Here, the demand and pattern are unknown as the coach teaches the athlete to make split-second decisions with movements based upon visible or audible signals. This skill level is very close to the chaos of actual game-play, with the athlete fighting to control the situation. Tag games characterize random agility, as do read-and-react tennis ball catches, resisted reactive drills, and plyometric landings immediately followed by an unknown movement demand.

The best way to teach agility is to consistently teach a little each day. As Frank Costello and E.J. "Doc" Kreis point out in their book, Sports Agility (Taylor Sports Publishing, Inc., Nashville, Tenn., 1993), agility training is as important as strength training, but takes only a fraction of the time. A typical workout sequence would include the following exercises, each of which should take about 10 minutes, and can be tailored to your athletes' skill levels:

1. Dynamic flexibility warmup. The warmup provides an excellent place to teach balance and coordination. Moving the body while elongating muscles not only warms and stretches, it teaches. Examples include: walks, runs, skips, twists, and standing motions that resemble those of a ballet dancer.
2. Innervation. This transition from the warmup to a high-demand period is characterized by footwork drills for coordination. One example utilizes the quick feet ladder. This piece of equipment looks like a ladder laid flat on the ground. The athlete performs drills while keeping his or her feet in between the rungs and sides. The key to using the quick feet ladder effectively is to understand that the goal is optimum speed, which is defined as speed that can be controlled.
3. Mechanics. In this section of practice, coordination and programmed agility are instructed through light plyometrics, change-of-direction drills, and other similar exercises. Balancing drills can also be used, such as standing on a K-board. The emphasis here is on teaching biomechanically sound movements.
4. Accumulation of potential. This is the "conditioning" time of practice, and programmed agility is ideal here, but in very controlled quantities. The potential for injury increases as you mix fatigue with highly demanding drills. Obstacle-course runs are great for varied stimuli movements.
5. Explosion. In this stage, where programmable and random agility are trained, work is done with medicine ball throws, high-quality plyometrics, and short speed bursts. One fun drill to incorporate here is the read-and-react drill, where two players bounce a "crazy" ball (a multi-sided ball that takes unpredictable bounces) in between each other. Resisted/assisted/contrasted drills may also be performed here. Quantities of efforts are carefully monitored--this is the place for fast action, but not tongue-hanging-out fatigue.
6. Expression of potential. This stage is quite short in duration but imperative. Ample rest is essential. Here the athlete applies the day's menu of skills into high-quality movement. Short, high-intensity tag games and random agility tests work great here. In this way the athlete walks away from practice with a sense of exhilaration at having moved fast and controlled the world.

While the above workout focuses on agility, it also has a conditioning component and helps develop sport-specific skills. As agility skills are mastered they can be more directly related to the sport--for example, throw the athlete chest or bounce passes while he or she is standing on the K-board, or have the athlete box out an imaginary opponent during the read-and-react drill. Most importantly, have fun with these exercises. They are the basis of athleticism and can provide wonderful new challenges to players at all levels.

The following drills are examples of fun ways to practice agility:

1. Read and React: In this drill, two softball players bounce a "crazy" ball (a multi-sided ball that takes unpredictable bounces) in between each other. This exercise teaches lateral motion, body position, and body control.
2. Breakaway Games: Using a breakaway belt, a thin nylon belt that loops around the athletes' waists and is attached at the mid-point between the two athletes by a Velcro strip, one athlete attempts to break away from the other athlete, while the second athlete tries to avoid the break by reading and reacting to the first athlete. This drill trains random agility, and its typical length of time is just 10 seconds per game.
3. Fancy Footwork: For this exercise, athletes work on innervation in the area of programmable agility with the Quickfoot Ladder. The pattern followed here is out, out, in, but it can be altered for different types of athletes.
4. Balancing Acts: Standing on the K-Board, the athlete must find a middle balance point on the board and maintain his or her balance by performing very little movement. Many different types of coordination drills can be made more difficult by using this type of balance board.

Published in Coaching Management 4.1 Basketball Preseason 1996

By Randy Smythe

Randy Smythe is President of Speed City, Inc., in Portland, Ore. An expert in speed, quickness, and lateral speed training, he serves as a consultant for several professional sport teams, Olympic teams, and elite athletes worldwide.