Agility Progression and Technique for Your Personal Training Athlete

Bridge the Gap Hands-On: Considerations for Speed, Agility and Movement in Ice Hockey

Tammy Kovaluk, CSCS, introduces the "pac-man drill" (also known as the "Ickey shuffle") which can be used for speed, agility, and quickness sessions.

In this session from the NSCA’s 2016 Personal Trainers Conference, Vance Ferrigno teaches how the body moves in spherical three dimensional space and how to apply fun and innovative speed, agility, and quickness drills to enhance total movement quality.

Loren Landow, owner of Landow Performance in Denver, CO, demonstrates errors and coaching tips for the pro agility drill.

Considerations for Speed, Agility and Movement in Ice Hockey

Traditional lower-body resistance exercise alone may not be an optimal means of developing agility. Further, the effectiveness of straight-sprint training on agility performance has not been well established. In contrast, jump training, including loaded jump squats and horizontal and lateral jumps, holds promise.

On-field success in sports requires the ability to solve sport-specific problems and utilize speed and agility within the specific context of the game. In this session from the 2015 NSCA National Conference, Ian Jeffreys explains how adding a task-based approach to an athlete’s speed and agility training can help ensure optimal transfer from training to game performance.

This article discusses the benefits of an upper body power program for law enforcement officers and how to program this effectively.

Agility is a key and complex concept within team sports performance. Because of its multidimensional nature, agility benefits from perceptual and cognitive skills as well as physical capacity (e.g., ability to exert acceleration, deceleration, and changes of direction). Agility should be integrated in different and complementary ways in team sports training. From more analytical to more ecological tasks, there is a need to comprehend the respective adaptations and identify how to integrate such a spectrum and, eventually, combine them in the training process and manage it accordingly to the player’s needs. Based on this premise, the purpose of this article is to present alternative methods and recommendations that may help to develop agility in field-based invasion sports. The main concepts pertaining to agility and associated capacities will be explored. Afterward, a proposal for a more analytical approach based on the use of cones and ladders will be introduced, as well as approaches based on small-sided games. Finally, an integration of agility training and a combination of approaches will be presented using soccer as an example.