Game Speed and Agility: Errors and Solutions

Agility might be the most misunderstood concept in the performance field as our profession lacks a thorough understanding of its meaning and its application.

Over the past 40 years, agility has run through the musical chairs of definitions. Since the 70s, we’ve used phrases such as:

• Ability to change direction rapidly
• Ability to change direction rapidly and accurately
• A whole-body change of direction and speed

Currently, the most accepted definition today is:

“A rapid, whole-body change of direction and speed in response to a stimulus”
Sheppard & Young, 2006

But even this definition leaves a lot to be desired and misses the boat on a number of important pieces (which we’ll get into).

Strength and conditioning specialists will typically look at agility through the lens of physical abilities: strength qualities, eccentric/isometric qualities, and reactive strength.

Pair this with most S&C’s education involving a big piece on biomechanics and you’ll see a large influence on a mechanical and technical model of joint angles, specific body positioning, foot placement, and kinematic/kinetic data driving feedback.

You can see this biomechanical bias with the need for coaches to categorize and label movement into terms like crossover step, side-step, split-step, hip turn, directional step, power cut, etc., and then use these to build their “movement” library.

Movement in sport is of a highly complex nature but is often pared down to binary movement categories, instead of utilizing a more integrated approach.

This is an exercise of futility and only works to water down and miss the complex nature of the athlete-environment relationship.

With this in mind, it’s imperative to remember that agility lives within a specific context, and without that context, there is no agility. So agility is NOT a singular bio-motor that one possesses or not, it depends on the context in which it’s being asked.

This is where the current definition of, “in response to a stimulus”, leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s not about a response to just any stimulus, rather it’s about the pick-up of specifying information from the athlete’s specific sporting environment to guide movement behavior.

I often think about the following quote when it comes to agility or better put, sport movement,

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

If we try to judge an athlete’s agility, outside of the context and environment in which they’ll be asked to perform, we’re not testing their agility.

Just as an NFL wide receiver may possess incredible agility on an NFL Sunday, place that same athlete on a soccer pitch and they’ll look like a fish trying to climb a tree.

Or if we ask an offensive lineman to play wide receiver their “agility” will clearly be lacking. BUT if you watched that offensive lineman all game, both in run blocking and pass protection, there is no doubt you’d come away saying they possess great agility to be able to pull out in front of their running back to kick out a linebacker or to pass set on a speedy defensive end, or to handle a stunt with ease.

There is a reason athletes play and specialize in certain positions (offense vs defense) as they are better equipped to handle the information and tasks of each.

For instance, watch a basketball game, on one end of the court an athlete will look amazing as they blow by a defender for a dunk, then on the other end, they’ll struggle to stay in front of the player they just burned.

Hopefully, you can start to see how we must change the lens in which we view sports movement. If we truly think a 505 or L-Drill or star drill is capturing the essence of agility, you’ll be disappointed.

To really capture this process, we need to appreciate the environment in which movement will organize and emerge. So going back, there is no singular definition or drill that can capture agility, it all depends on the task and performance environment.

So what does all this mean?

First, we have to respect the environment as much as we respect the athlete themselves. The athlete is always performing in an environment; the athlete and that environment are always linked and their relationship is mutual. So in my opinion agility has to start with an environment.

Second, that environment should seek to preserve the key specifying information variables from sport. To make agility stick and transfer to sport, coaches must ensure the information in their training activities is similar to what they’ll encounter in the game.

So think about variables like space, time, opponent(s), equipment, rules, situations, and intentions of the game environment, and see if you can maintain some essence of those in your training activities.

Lastly, as stated early, agility is not something that one possesses and owns; it’s an ongoing and continually adapting process. Athletes don’t actually acquire the skill of agility; rather athletes gain experience of adapting and picking up specifying information (becoming more attuned) and then organizing and scaling movement solutions to this specifying information (calibration).

With all this in mind and with the framework of viewing agility not only through a movement pattern lens but also an environmental/task lens, let’s examine a few popular methods in the agility world.

Colored Cones, Numbered Cones, Flashing Light-Based “Agility”

While these can be fun and engaging, I can’t recall any sports with any of these “tools” present in the game.

Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve used these and continue to use these, primarily with a youth population for those reasons of fun, engagement, and competition.

BUT with any athlete or team of higher qualification, these not only lack any sort of representation of the sport, they might actually be detrimental to actual on-field performance.

It’s funny we bash the ladder for its severe lack of developing any sort of movement skill or behavior, but don’t bat an eye at these tools.

Watch an athlete perform these activities

• Where are their eyes? (on the ground looking for the colored cone or fixating on a projector screen)
• What are they perceiving? (non-specific information and the resultant movements, postures, and neuromuscular strategies are different (Lee et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2013))
• Is the movement behavior productive? (Typically they’re lunging, out of control, for the flashing light or colored cone)
• Is the decision-making process similar? (They’re trying to process discrete information instead of picking-up context-specific information)

Some have purposed these as possible methods to train “worst-case scenarios” as Lee et al (2013) demonstrated a generic stimulus (flashing arrow) had higher knee valgus moments compared to 3D projections of defender(s).

What’s missed is that higher-level athletes exhibited lower knee valgus moments and “better” postures compared to low-level athletes in the more specific tasks (3D projections of defenders), showing higher-level athletes have better attunement to specific sporting tasks which allow them to move in “better/safer” positions.

Perceptive abilities play a significant role in how likely an athlete is to be injured. Better-perceiving athletes land in better positions than those with poor perception abilities.

I like to think of it as; poor perception will lead to poor positions. So when athletes find themselves out of position, in many cases, it’s due to a poor perceptual issue and this won’t be improved by spending time reacting to flashing arrows on a projector screen.

Command-Based “Agility”

This would fall under a similar framework as colored/number cones or flashing lights. When a coach yells or points “LEFT”, “RIGHT” this is not indicative of any action that will occur in any sport.

This will piss some coaches off, but I can’t help to think this is done purely so coaches can feel involved.

Also, this strategy of pointing a finger or yelling a verbal command is NOT a progression or bridge to more specific information sources. Seriously, how does one justify this as perceptual training?

This comes back to the problem with the currently accepted definition of agility. This scenario is technically reacting to a stimulus, but it doesn’t take much critical thought to see how this stimulus is irrelevant and lazy.

Instead, just have another athlete stand in front and take a hard step at any angle to preserve the primary perceptual source in most team sports, another human being moving in more authentic manners!

In many team sport environments, coaches are at no limitation to athletes being present. There is really no reason why coaches can’t use these bodies instead of pointing fingers or yelling out commands.

The abundance of bodies should be seen as a benefit rather than a logistical nightmare. Instead of using cones or bags to set-up a drill and have athletes cut around, use all those bodies so athletes have to interact and maneuver in and around those bodies… you know like they do in the actual sport.

Tag, Mirror, Cat-Mouse Based “Agility”?

I’m actually a fan of tag, mirroring, and cat-mouse activities, and I still use these quite a bit, BUT these activities are now used as mostly warm-up activities and in my higher qualification athletes, they may not even be present.

Why?

First, if you critically evaluate the behavior, specifying information, and movement strategies in these activities, they don’t represent such behaviors or movements in sport. While they may increase some creativity and open up movement solutions (why they are great for a warm-up), they may actually encourage poor behavior and habits to emerge.

Let’s start with tag. Tag looks nothing like a tackle in football or defending someone in basketball or a tackle in soccer. These skills require players to close and cut off space, in a controlled manner with the specific task goal of stopping an opponent from certain space (first down, basket, goal). It’s easy to see how tag could lead to poor habits of a defender lunging, reaching and moving at uncontrolled speeds, as this is typically rewarded in tag activities.

Mirroring activities may lead to perceptual fixation rather than a continuous search of the space. In sports, mirroring occurs in very short bursts NOT long bouts of 8-12 seconds.

If coaches would spend more time doing athletic things (like playing sports) and less time in the weight room, this would be abundantly clear. It was a realization I had a 4-years ago playing basketball. As I was playing defense, I started to realize that I didn’t fixate and mirror an offensive threat continuously. I was continually searching the workspace for information like obstructions (blocks, screens, picks, other players), spacing (from teammates, other opponents, sidelines, scoring zones), and had a specific task related goal (push offender to baseline/help defense, cut off from ball, shut off space to the hoop). It was through play (with a coaching lens) that I realized my mirroring activities we’re in no way similar to the search behavior of sport.

Lastly, two big issues with these activities are:

• They typically act as a plug and play for coaches

Coaches want a recipe (list of drills) instead of learning how to cook (building agility activities that represent the sport and needs of your athletes). Tag, mirroring, cat-mouse are easy plug and play activities and in many cases, coaches implement them because they saw a video instead of critically evaluating the why.

• They act as the furthest along the representative task design scale in a coach’s journey.

If these activities are the furthest you go in your agility training, you’re missing out on a ton. Our team at Emergence (we consult with coaches on agility/sport movement) has found these activities are as deep many coaches go when planning agility. If you work with youth/novices, go ahead, but if you work with higher qualification athletes, tag/mirroring is NOT going to cut it for developing sport movement.

Coaches want a recipe (list of drills) instead of learning how to cook.

Progressions of “Agility”

As mentioned earlier, coaches love to categorize and break down movement and then make a spreadsheet of progressions/regressions of drills based on these senseless movement categorizations.

They take these isolated parts of a whole movement and work through these progressions until each movement is “perfected” and slowly, if ever, work towards something that resembles sport.

The problem with this approach can be summed in the ever-famous quote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

When you try to break down complex movement and behaviors into de-coupled constituent parts, you not only lose the essence of the whole but those parts WILL NOT add back to a better whole.

The essence of training shouldn’t be to perfect a specific movement pattern in a de-coupled, repetition-after-repetition manner. Rather, training should aim to enhance the interaction of the athlete with the performance environment.

Now, this doesn’t mean we throw athletes to the fire but the aim is task simplification NOT task decomposition.

Decomposition is breaking down the whole, into smaller parts and training each part in hopes it will be re-build a better whole. A reason many coaches have shifted to an ecological approach over the past few years is that they’ve spent years working on task decomposition only to have this isolation of the parts never actually help the whole.

Simplification is keeping the whole (information-movement coupling), but just simplifying the task. If you feel a movement environment is too complex, simplify it by reducing speed, space, time, number of opponents, modifying equipment, and altering rules. There are tons of ways to simplify complex movement environments that don’t consist of breaking it down into de-coupled parts.

Sport Movement Agility

So this takes us to sports movement, a term I feel conveys a better message than agility.

Enhancing sport movement skills can be seen as a learning endeavor. A continuous endeavor that an athlete never truly possesses or acquires, rather it’s about athletes continually adapting to the ever-changing performance environment and their own changing physical, perceptual, and psychological capacities.

Learning can be characterized as the development of effective information-movement couplings (information from the sporting environment guides movement), so the aim of training should be to guide athletes in this development.

The coaches’ goal is to organize practice to allow athletes to adapt and pick up specifying information (becoming more attuned), and then organize and scale movement solutions to this specifying information (calibration).

Let’s look at a few ways that coaches can impact their athlete’s sport movement

Warm-Up

As I said earlier, our warm-up now looks like what my agility sessions used to look like. Lots of exploration, low-level mirroring, and cat-mouse type activities.

The purpose of the warm-up has become much more than simply increasing blood flow, raising body temperature, increasing ROM, etc. The warm-up now serves as a period where athletes search and explore to unlock abundant movement solutions in hopes to expand their movement toolbox and interact with an information-rich environment.

It’s actually a misconception that those who see themselves as sport movement skill coaches only believe in specificity. While the specificity of the environment is important (See Representative Task Design a few paragraphs down), we also believe in promoting a ton of exploration and movement in a general environment. I believe that movement abundance enhances specific movement skill. Movement abundance acts as the foundation for creative, adaptive movement skill.

In fact, Strafford et al. (2018) suggested that activities like parkour may enhance movement skills by the nature of navigating a “live” landscape where they are continually picking up and perceiving information, coordinating and adapting movements across the obstacles all while actively making decisions, taking risks, transitioning between skills and unlocking abundant movement solutions.

I’ll take this kind of warm-up any day instead of the monotonous, often militaristic warm-up lines with choreographed knee hugs and carioca, day in and day out.

The Coach’s Role in Sport Movement

Coaches who take an athlete-centered approach are often accused of not coaching and instead just setting up an activity and letting athletes move and organize in any fashion with no feedback.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

While building information-rich training environments is key, the coach’s role works well beyond just that. The goal of communication and feedback is to be facilitative rather than prescriptive. Coaches can facilitate and guide the athlete’s problem-solving process within the environment.

A great starting point is educating the athlete’s intention. Understand that an athlete’s intention will act as the main constraint guiding their attention and search process which will lead to what information they may attune to. The phrase perception-action coupling is becoming more popular, but the athlete’s INTENTION will directly influence perception and thus action. Everything needs to start with intention.

Easy suggestions or reminders of “search the space”, “where are your eyes”, “what could you have done better”, “try this, see how it feels”, “stay within yourself”, “be creative here”, “what did you feel or sense” are all good strategies to help guide the intention of athletes to take ownership of their problem-solving abilities.

Manipulate Constraints

Constraints act as boundaries to skilled movement and for coaches are a fantastic way to manipulate key features of the environment to guide and shape adaptive and emergent movement behavior. How coaches manipulate constraints can enhance (or reduce) an athlete’s search of the workspace for functional solutions to dynamic movement problems.

With this context, it can be beneficial for coaches to view skill acquisition as a search process; the search through the perceptual-motor workspace for specifying information, perceiving affordances (opportunities for action), and organizing movement solutions (Newell et al. 1989). So the use of constraints should be used to enhance this search process.

To be clear, everything a coach applies is technically a constraint, so a Constraints Led Approach (CLA) is a framework to view how movement emerges; it’s NOT a singular coaching approach. If you lay down a ladder, it will constrain the movement behavior of an athlete (albeit in a poor manner). If you set-up cones to perform various COD tasks, those cones and distances and prescribed movements are all constraints (again likely a poor strategy).

When thinking about how to apply constraints, they shouldn’t be used to force athletes to move a certain way; rather they should promote an athlete’s search to find functional movement solutions. Constraints are a wonderful way to individualize movement training to meet athletes at their challenge point and provide learning environments that match their level.

Constraints should promote an athlete’s search to find functional movement solutions.

So what are some key constraints to manipulate?

• Space: The size and shape of a workspace will directly influence movement behavior. More space will give athletes more opportunities to be creative and adaptive as they try to exploit that space. More space will also mean higher velocities; so more space will allow athletes to reach maximal speeds while in more contextual environments.

The shape of the workspace will also influence movement behavior. For example, a long and skinny space = greater linear-based movement solutions. Wide and short = more lateral, change of direction-based movement solutions. Circular space = curved and maneuverable movement solutions.

• Time: Time and space are somewhat similar. More time = more exploratory behaviors from athletes. Less time = athletes having to quickly pick up information and make quicker decisions. How you manipulate time will influence the athlete’s search process and what information they use to guide their movement.
• Opponents: The number of athletes in a space is a great way to increase or decrease complexity. For some athletes, 1v1 scenarios are more than enough complexity for where they stand, but for many more (especially college athletes and beyond) 1v1 scenarios actually lack the complexity and necessary information for their movement skills to grow.

As stated earlier, if coaches are only getting to 1v1 scenarios, they are leaving a huge gap for their athletes. When discussing opponents, it’s also more than just numbers, but also where they start/line up in a workspace (put players at an advantage/disadvantage), the skill level of the athlete, and the skill style of the athlete. I like to switch up opponents frequently because each individual athlete presents unique problems that you don’t get if you stay with one partner the whole entire session.

• The Athlete: Putting constraints on the athlete has been a popular tool as of late. Things like using no arms, wearing a weighted vest, perturbing vision, fatigue and attentional focus can all be considered athlete constraints. A popular method in track and field is to do various accelerations or upright runs with no arms (via holding a stick or arms crossed) to promote positive self-organization of the lower half to adapt around this constraint.
• Equipment: Manipulating equipment, especially in implement-based sports, can be another great constraint for coaches to be cognizant of. If you follow baseball, the use of weighted balls and bats has seen a huge surge. One could argue these tools provide benefit from perturbing the movement system for positive skill adaptation as much, if not more, than their use to increase physical outputs. Practicing with different weighted/sized balls, implements, changing up the playing surface, footwear, etc all require the athlete’s movement system to adapt and adjust to coordinate their actions around these manipulations. The goal would be to create more robust and adaptive movement solutions.

If you work with youth athletes, manipulating equipment is an absolute must. Many coaches already do this (using a futsol ball, lowering rims in basketball, less bouncy tennis balls, lighter baseball bats), but manipulating equipment can allow for more appropriate scaling of movement to meet a young, growing athlete.

• Coaching: As touched upon earlier, the coach plays a huge role in developing skillful movers. It obviously starts with spending much more time on the front end to develop environments that implicitly promote learning. Communication also plays a tremendous role, but again it is much less about prescriptive cues and feedback and more facilitative and exploratory-based feedback.

Planning Sessions

When planning sessions, it’s time to move beyond the reductionist approach of planning purely linear vs lateral sessions and move towards learning and skill-themed sessions.

The following are practical steps to plan your next agility session.

Intention

This all starts with both global and local intentions. This will be the foundation of building out an agility session. These intentions should be derived from analysis (film study and athlete interviewing) of your athletes in their sporting environment. This isn’t reverse engineering the sport (which typically only involves bioenergetics and biomechanical breakdown), it’s evaluating how your athletes interact with the problems they face in sport. This analysis process will provide you with all the information you’ll need to design effective training environments.

As you’ll see below in a sample session planning tool we use at Emergence, various intentions are the starting point in building and planning your agility session.

The intention of the movement session will depend on a lot of factors; time of year, athlete weaknesses, how long before the next game, athlete feedback, film breakdown from previous sessions, athlete’s psychological, physical, and emotional state, and so on.

While enhancing sports movement skill can be seen as a learning endeavor, we have to respect that learning-oriented movement sessions are stressful! Not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically.

Why?

They involve failure, they involve being stretched and pushed to their challenge point. Doing this day in and day out can be taxing for an athlete as each session often involves a lot of struggle and failure. So sessions designed around performance, confidence, and competence (more success, less failure) are important to include, and again this comes into session intentions.

The last bit on intentions is to make sure your session intentions as a coach align with the athlete. This means communicating that day’s intention so the athlete understands the objective for that day so they can be mentally and emotionally prepared for it. It also means giving the athletes a say in that day’s intention. I’ll often ask my athletes before sessions what they’d like to see or have as a theme for the day. This not only gives them ownership but also allows you as a coach to see where they are at and what they feel they need at that given time.

Representative Task Design

The next key concept when planning a session is Representative Task Design (RTD). Ecological psychologist Egon Brunswik suggested the concept of representative design when it came to research design. He proposed, “proper sampling of situations and problems may in the end by more important than a proper sampling of subjects” (Brunswik, 1947).

What this means is the perceptual variables from the performance environment should be maintained in the practice environment to promote the intended skilled behavior adaptations. It is suggested that practice should aim to ensure action fidelity and functionality.

Action Fidelity: The movement behavior is the same in training as in competition.

Functionality: The perceptual information is the same in training as in competition.

I give all of my agility session activities an RTD scale (1-10), with 10 being the sport and 1 being as far removed as possible. This is good practice to rate your agility activities to see where they stack up and then use this as a guide to help plan your agility sessions. Again, this means the same agility activities will have different RTD scales for different athletes. I might have an RTD scale of 7 for a soccer forward, but that same activity would be a 5 for a defender.

Finally, as we discussed earlier, based on the evaluation of your athlete’s movement skill WITHIN their sport (not a table assessment, not a warm-up assessment, not a physical capacity testing assessment), you can start to implement constraints to promote functional movement skill adaptations that help the athlete improve where it matters most, on the field.

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Conclusion

To wrap this up, I hope this article challenged you to think more deeply about agility and what it actually means. The goal of this wasn’t to provide you with more drills that you can copy and paste, but rather to change the lens and process you use when planning and assessing agility sessions.

“If you give a man a fish, he will eat today, but teach a man to fish and he will eat forever”

This statement is not only for coaches but also for your athletes. Don’t seek to provide them with YOUR solution to the various movement problems they’ll face. Instead, allow and help facilitate them to find their OWN authentic movement solutions.

Any and all feedback is welcome and hopefully, this can start a healthy dialogue.

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References

Brunswik, E. (1947). Systematic and representative design of psychological experiments. In Proceedings of the Berkeley symposium on mathematical statistics and probability (pp. 143-202).

Lee, M. J., Lloyd, D. G., Lay, B. S., Bourke, P. D., & Alderson, J. A. (2013). Effects of different visual stimuli on postures and knee moments during sidestepping. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 45(9), 1740-1748.

Lee, M. J. C., Lloyd, D. G., Lay, B. S., Bourke, P. D., & Alderson, J. A. (2017). Different visual stimuli affect body reorientation strategies during sidestepping. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 27(5), 492-500.

Newell, K. M., Kugler, P. N., van Emmerik, R. E. A., and McDonald, P. V. (1989). “Search strategies and the acquisition of coordination,” in Perspectives on the Coordination of Movement, ed. S. A. Wallace (North Holland: Elsevier), 85–122. doi: 10.1016/s0166-4115(08)60019-9

Sheppard, J. M., & Young, W. B. (2006). Agility literature review: Classifications, training, and testing. Journal of sports sciences, 24(9), 919-932.

Strafford, B. W., Van Der Steen, P., Davids, K., & Stone, J. A. (2018). Parkour as a donor sport for athletic development in youth team sports: insights through an ecological dynamics lens. Sports medicine-open, 4(1), 21.