The Skill You Need to Stay Forever Young
Coaching
Pros call on agility to win, but this misunderstood ability is the key to an easier, comfier, fitter life for all.
- Agility is different from speed — it means smoother moves and sharper reactions.
- Being nimble can help ward off injury, one of the biggest obstacles to fitness and sports progress.
- Before training for agility, do a quick test from experts to assess your stability.
Read on to learn more…
Remember playing freeze tag or hot potato at recess? You didn’t know it then, but that was agility training. Those games require the same skills that athletes channel when jumping into a passing lane on a basketball court, returning a speedy serve in a tennis match, or diverting a deflected ball into the back of the goal.
Athlete or not, training your agility as an adult can help sharpen your physical and mental reaction skills, making you stronger in and out of the gym, says Greg Grosicki, PhD, the director of the exercise-physiology laboratory at Georgia Southern University. And you’ll be better able to avoid injury, pretty much the greatest obstacle in sports and fitness, so progress can keep a’coming.
OK, But What Exactly Is Agility?
Bear with us while we get a little nerdy. “Agility was defined in 2006 in a study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences as ‘a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus,’” says Grosicki. To put it simply, according to Nike Trainer Brian Nunez, “Agility is what allows you to be able to go, stop, hold and quickly change position.”
That last part is key, because it means being able to interpret and respond to environmental cues, like catching a medicine ball a workout buddy thrusts at you from 6 feet away, moving quickly out of the way when a cyclist suddenly swerves into your running path, or catching yourself if you’re slipping on ice, says Grosicki.
A lot of people think that speed and agility both essentially mean “quick feet.” But while speed is certainly part of agility, there’s more to it than that. “A tennis player might benefit from speed when accelerating to get to a ball, but agility is what helps them re-establish their position on the court to prepare for the next volley,” says Grosicki. Speed is all about top-end velocity (in other words, how fast you can get from point A to point B), he adds. It doesn’t account for the multidirectional nature and real-time decision-making processes that are so crucial to getting ahead in many sports — and in life. That, friends, is agility.
Why Agility Matters
On a field or court, agility determines how well preplanned maneuvers go or how a player reacts to an opponent. This can be the difference between rising high to score with a header or being beaten to the ball. It could also be the difference between getting hurt or staying healthy. “In soccer, ACL injuries most often occur during sudden deceleration and change-of-direction maneuvers — and agility-related training interventions can decrease the incidence of those,” says Grosicki.
Being agile can also reduce your risk of injury when you’re not exercising or playing. “Physical factors important to agility, such as muscle strength and power as well as stability, help you better perform activities of normal living,” says Grosicki. Whether you’re picking up laundry, getting in and out of a car, or even just walking on uneven ground, life calls for a sense of spatial awareness and control over your body, and that comes with agility.
There’s more: The skill also engages your brain. “Agility requires a huge level of mental acuity and awareness,” says Nunez. “When you’re training in multiple directions, you can’t check out and go on autopilot. It forces you to be mindful in your movement, which is key to increasing body awareness in training and helps reduce the risk of injury even more.” Basically, you’ll be more mentally and physically spry, which can help you hit your fitness goals.
How to Improve Your A Game
You don’t have to spend hours on an obstacle course to see a difference in your multidirectional speed and reaction time, says Nunez. Spark progress with these drills, which can be done daily or as part of any warm-up.
- Start with deceleration.
Knowing how to properly absorb impact and stabilize your body is the basis of agility training, says Nunez. “You have to train the brakes before you work the gas,” he explains. Here’s a quick test to see whether you have the right foundation to build on: After a short warm-up, stand with your feet hip-width apart and, as quickly as you can, drop into a squat and hold it at the bottom. Do you wobble, or are you steady? “If you are rock solid, that means you have control of your posture in a dynamic movement. But if you’re wobbling, adding more force or amplitude — by, say, turning that squat into a squat jump — would be a recipe for disaster, because your body isn’t ready to handle a dynamic load when you stop,” says Nunez.
If you’re wobbly, focus on improving your stability before taking your agility work to the next level. Nunez recommends starting in a standing position and quickly moving to balancing on one leg for 3 to 5 seconds, then switching legs and repeating for a few rounds. If you’re still struggling to balance, incorporate more single-leg exercises into your workouts a couple of times per week. - Change direction.
Once you’ve got your stability down, you can start to work on agility. But keep in mind, “Life doesn’t happen in a linear plane,” says Nunez, meaning you don’t move in just one direction. Training should happen in all three planes of motion: sagittal (forward and backward), transverse (rotating from left to right or right to left), and frontal (side to side, or lateral).
“Setting up an agility ladder or creating one with chalk or tape lets you do all kinds of tri-planar movements,” he adds, from forward and crossover work to side shuffles. (Your goal is to hit your mark, whether that’s the inside the ladder or outside the edges, every time to refine your spatial awareness.) The more confident you get, the more you can push your speed in any direction with less risk of tripping or losing your position to a point where you can’t re-establish it quickly, says Nunez. If you’re not sure how to do ladder exercises, do a quick Google search and click only on links that feature a reputable, certified trainer. - Engage your reflexes.
Now that you’re getting better at 360-degree movement with a lower chance of falling, you can home in on the last step of agility training: fine-tuning your reflexes. Drills like throwing a tennis ball or medicine ball at the wall and catching it, or even just keeping a balloon off the ground, force you to move dynamically in response to the unpredictability of the object’s motions, says Nunez. Again, “You’re working in all planes of motion — squatting, twisting, side shuffling — and you’re being forced to accelerate, decelerate and stop on demand, which maximizes body control.” Over time, this allows you to trust your movement patterns when going full speed, he explains.
If you want to take it a beat further, try throwing that ball or whacking that balloon toward a different spot each time, says Nunez. The more you train yourself to shift around without knowing exactly where you’ll have to move next, the sharper your reflexes become.
The best part of agility work is that it feels a helluva lot like a childhood game. Recess? Training? Maybe it’s all the same, anyway.
Words: Ashley Mateo
Illustrations: Ryan Johnson
CHECK IT OUT
You can’t train agility without having a strong foundation on your feet. Hop into the Daily Move Challenge program in the Nike Training Club app to start building strength and stability today. And don’t forget to dress the part with the Metcon, the shoe designed for this very reason.