This excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness highlights the high-intensity, reactive agility hockey players require, and provides two agility drills that challenge that skill.

Coaches can use drills to improve quickness and agility. The training session can improve the specific areas needed to increase performance results by setting up appropriate intensity levels, duration of drills, recovery periods, and volume of drills.

Line drills can be an excellent way for athletes to improve their footwork, speed, and coordination. This article contains examples of several easy-to-implement line drills.

PT 2022

Scenarios that provide a stimulus relevant to the sporting environment may help athletes develop better anticipation skills through the refinement of search strategies, response speed and accuracy, pattern recognition, and decision-making abilities.

This article provides medicine ball exercise progressions to help build athleticism in youth athletes.

Maria Mountain demonstrates of an off-ice agility cone drill to help hockey players work on multidirectional transitions using forward, backward, and lateral crossover patterns.

This excerpt from Developing Speed describes an agility drill that aims to develop change of direction.

The aim of the get up and go drill for rugby players is to develop the ability to accelerate from a low body position, which is especially important when accelerating into a potential contact situation.

Multidirectional ground reaction forces (GRFs) and jump tests within baseball pitchers provide insight into athletic ability and coordination to produce lower-body force and power. Lower-body power is a biomechanical feature that denotes physiological capacity through dynamic and passive tissue stretch-shortening in transferring energy from the ground through the kinetic chain. Optimized lower-body power may lessen the magnitude of forces on the upper extremity. Insufficient lower-body power may create a greater risk of upper-body injury. Lower-body power and its relationship to ball velocity have been minimally investigated, yet some research points to a correlation between jumping ability and fastball velocity. Because pitching is unilateral, practitioners should consider unilateral jumps to determine the extent of bilateral asymmetry or stride to drive leg differences that can guide training to remediate deficiencies. The purposes of this brief review are to (a) examine factors that influence vertical jump performance among baseball players, (b) examine research on pitching multidirectional GRFs, and (c) examine literature concerning jump performances to baseball pitching performance. Collectively, this review can assist coaches and practitioners in lower-body power testing and training for baseball pitchers.