Speed/Agility: More Than Mindless Drills

I recently had a conversation about speed and agility training from the standpoint of how to prepare young strength and conditioning coaches for it. I made the recommendation that we need a lot of introductory coaching books for the various sports that they may work with as understanding the movement patterns and cues is going to be extremely important for a successful speed and agility program. This was not what the other person wanted to hear as they were looking for a resource that had a lot of speed and agility drills. I explained that I have been moving away from this for a long time now and that my training approach has been evolving over the last ten years.

I think that in terms of an athlete’s season and in terms of an athlete’s career, speed and agility can be viewed as a series of steps:
• Foundational
• Application
• Specialization

Foundational Speed/Agility Training
Young athletes participate in sports, but these sports may not be the sports that they end up playing as they become older. Hopefully they participate in a wide variety of sports, though I understand that is rare today. Regardless of the sport, with regards to speed and agility, there are certain commonalities. For example, we want an explosive first step. We want to accelerate using frontside mechanics. We need to stop suddenly, move in different directions, etc.

Foundational speed and agility training seeks to do a number of things. First, prepare the athlete’s body. This is one of the places that I think drills are really useful, they serve as strength, power, and mobility training for speed and agility. Second, teach fundamental speed and agility skills. During a season, this should be done during the general preparation phase of training. Finally, the ability to run quickly in a straight line and change directions is trained in parallel to preparing the body and teaching skills.

Application Speed/Agility Training
Foundational training is just that, it lays the foundation for future work. It is, however, very general in nature. In the weight room, its parallel is the concept of training to train. In order to use speed and agility training to benefit the athlete, it has to be applied to the sport. For most athletes, this typically occurs after a few years of foundational training. During a season, this would occur during the special preparation phase of training.

This stage of training sees the athlete with a foot in foundational training and a foot in specialized training, it is a bridge between the two. In this stage of training, the athlete is still performing drills and fundamental skills, but these often serve as the athlete’s warm-up. The ability to run quickly in a straight line and change directions is emphasized in training. In addition, the athlete begins to focus on fundamental movement skills to the sport and begins to perform speed/agility drills that incorporate these skills as well as opponents and the ball.

Specialization Speed/Agility Training
Some athletes, few, after training for many years reach elite status. At this stage there is not much time or benefit in generalized training. The result is a need to train the athlete to gain a fraction of a second on an opponent, this means that speed and agility training focuses on sport situations and movement patterns.

This also occurs in a season during the competition phase of training when travel, competition, and sports practice limit the athlete’s ability to participate in other forms of training. Drills, fundamental movement skills, and straight ahead sprinting might be used as warm-ups in this phase but the focus of the training is on sport specificity.

The table below shows examples of how training might differ in each stage of training for a baseball player.