Agility: What is It, Do We Need it, or Are We Wasting Our Time?

Agility – What Is It?

Agility is like that third cousin, who may or may not be related to the family. You Talk about them, but very rarely do you make an effort to include them. 

When it comes to utilizing the optimal approach to developing agility, it seems the jury is still out. Most coaches would agree that their training protocols for strength, power, speed, and endurance are pretty similar. But agility is different.

Agility is this awkward, grey area that tries to bridge the gap between skill acquisition, sport form, and athletic movements. 

I believe true “agility” training is one of the MOST beneficial things you can include in your training program, when taught, implemented, and progresses the right way. 

In this article series, I aim to provide some clarity as what it truly means to train for agility.

What is Agility? Common Misconceptions

The first mistake most performance coaches make when thinking about agility is that they believe it simply describes how well an athlete changes direction. 

Thus, the creation of many “agility” drills to “test” agility: i.e., the 20-yard shuttle, the 3-cone drill, the 5-0-5 test, and many more. These tests and drills measure change of direction ability, which are key components of a performance program. However, these tests have a closed environments, meaning the drill is predetermined and the athletes must simply learn the pattern and then perform it as fast as possible to be deemed as “agile.” 

So, what is agility? 

One of the most important concepts to understand about agility is that, in the game, an athlete will not change direction unless something tells the athlete to do so. An athlete must perceive a particular stimulus and then formulate a response to it. 

As Ian Jeffreys points out in the beginning of his book Gamespeed:

“There will always be a context-specificity to the task, with the athlete moving with control and precision with the ultimate aim of successfully carrying out the task at hand. Importantly, this is not purely reactive, as the athlete will be constantly adjusting and manipulating his movements in relation to the way the environment is evolving around him.”

Consider a basketball player who catches an outlet pass, turns around, and finds no defender in front of him to get to the hoop.  Will he make a move to blow past an opponent? No, he will simply sprint linearly at an appropriate speed to get to the hoop and score. 

Now let’s say that he turns around and there is a defender in stance waiting to cut him off. 

 Will he change direction? Most certainly, as he now sees a set of obstacles that he must maneuver around to the rim. 

Different contexts, different movement solutions.

One of my favorite definitions of agility comes from Sophia Nimphius of Edith Cowan University: “Agility is the perception-cognitive ability to react to a stimulus (i.e., defender or bounce of a ball) in addition to the physical ability to change direction in response to this stimulus.”

We see by this definition that agility becomes about far more than JUST change of direction ability—we have to consider the perceptual (what the athlete reads) and cognitive (what the athlete knows) elements of sensing stimuli in the playing environment and formulating an appropriate movement solution to solve the specific motor problem. 

A motor problem can be understood as a situation the athlete faces while trying to carry out a sport task. Also, from Nimphius’ definition, we see that it’s not enough to properly perceive the stimuli—athletes must also possess the physical ability to actually carry out their chosen movement solution.

Perceptual-Cognitive Work 

An analogy I like to use when it comes to agility training is the following: 

“When you think about it, we don’t even pick up a glass of water the same way. However, understanding hand position, perception, and body awareness are all skills/patterns (cutting,80/20, hip placement) that we can teach. ” 

We can immediately see that perceptual-cognitive speed is one of the two primary pillars of agility performance. Yet, far too often, coaches will ignore this pillar and focus primarily on everything that falls under change of direction speed: namely strength, power, reactive strength, and linear sprint speed. 

These qualities are absolutely necessary, but we will soon explore the potential implications of ignoring the perceptual-cognitive qualities in the training process.

The Skilled Athlete

One of the most eye-opening books I have read over the past year is Nonlinear Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition: An Introduction by Jia Yi Chow, Keith Davids, Chris Button, and Ian Renshaw. In this text, the authors provide some key points that they feel describe skilled athletes in sport.3

Skilled athletes are able to:

1. Produce functional, efficient, and effective movement patterns that appear smooth and effortless.
2. Coordinate their actions successfully, with respect to important environmental surfaces, objects, and other individuals, demonstrating precise timing between movements.
3. Consistently reproduce stable and functional coordination solutions under the stress of competition.
4. Organize movement patterns that are not automated in the sense of being identical from one performance trial to the next, but that are subtly varied and precisely adapted to immediate changes in the environment.

The first point seems obvious. We intuitively understand that the best athletes in the world make their job look easy. But the other three points warrant some consideration. 

Athletes must understand WHEN to utilize particular movement patterns. This is based upon the environment: where are your teammates, where are your opponents, where is the ball, etc.

The third point stresses the importance of a reproducible coordination solution, not a coordination pattern. This is an important distinction, as it implies that a successful solution (i.e., scoring a goal in soccer) can be accomplished with varying coordination patterns (i.e., bicycle kick, place kick, header). The best athletes appear to find consistent solutions for varying sport problems and do so in flexible, adaptable ways.

Even when the bulk of the movement pattern seems identical, subtle differences will always exist. These differences are necessary, because they allow athletes to remain responsive to their environment and flexibly shape their movement solutions to fit the specific situation in front of them.