This article is re-printed with the kind permission of Vern Gambetta, President of Gambetta Sports Training Systems in Sarasota, Fla., and the former Director of Conditioning for the Chicago White Sox.

Throughout my career I have had a fascination with agility. As a young athlete, it was painfully obvious to me that the best players were not the ones who won wind sprints during practice, but those who were fastest during the game. Yet my football coach was training us for straight-ahead speed.

In the 30 years since, we've come a long way in training for game speed. We've learned that agility and quickness are usually more important than straight-ahead speed, and that the mechanics of straight-ahead speed differ from those used for game speed. However, there are still many misconceptions about the most effective ways to train for speed and agility-misconceptions that keep many athletes from reaching their full potential.

The most harmful misconception is that agility training is not necessary outside of actual sport-skills practices. The argument here is that practicing movements outside the sport is contrived and entails only non-specific work that will not transfer to the game. The same nay-sayers also believe that it is impossible for a training session to duplicate the intensity of an actual practice or game.

I do not share that viewpoint. I believe that if you carefully design agility drills, you will progress the athlete more efficiently, and with less chance of injury, than you will by working on agility only in practices. If you tap into the exact repertoire of coordinative abilities that make up the movement components of the specific sport, make the overload progressive, follow sound motor learning principles, and adapt drills to each individual athlete, you are doing much more for the athlete than he or she experiences when practicing game-like situations. During a typical sport practice, drills do not allow for learning a progression of movement skills. Nor do they allow for the kind of biomechanical analysis that can be made during a strength and conditioning session.

Other misconceptions center on the components of agility, proper progressions, and how and when to train agility. I will go into detail on these areas in the following sections.

Coordination & Strength
While page after page has been published about speed training, motor learning, strength, and agility, very little has been written about how to integrate them. The principles of speed development are well known, but have not been systematically applied with the improvement of agility in mind. The principles of speed training. The principles of leg strength are clear, but it is not clear how to harness that strength for agility.

Without a lot of guidance on this topic, many strength coaches train agility in isolation. However, in my experience, this is not effective. Perhaps we put the cart before the horse by training agility in isolation. Instead, we need to train two areas before adding in more sophisticated agility drills: the underlying coordinative abilities and strength.

Fully developed coordinative abilities provide a repertoire of motor skills that can be adapted to deal with the demands of sport specific movements. What are those coordinative abilities?

Balance: maintenance of the center of gravity over the base of support, which is both a static and a dynamic quality.

Kinesthetic differentiation: ability to feel tension in movement to achieve the desired movement.

Spatial orientation: control of the body in space.

Reaction to signals: ability to respond quickly to auditory, visual, and kinesthetic cues.

Sense of rhythm: ability to match movement to time.