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.

Both unilateral and bilateral training should be used to optimally develop basketball players. This article compares single-leg and double-leg training options and provides considerations and potential implications for training basketball athletes.

A fundamental training program at a young age gives the athlete the opportunity to develop many skills needed to succeed. The implementation of agility and coordination training can help reduce the risk of injury and elevate a young developing athlete.

This excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness highlights the high-intensity, reactive agility hockey players require, and provides two agility drills that challenge that skill.

This article is the 11th in a continuing series of tactical strength and conditioning (TSAC) research reviews. It is designed to bring awareness to new research findings of relevance to tactical strength and conditioning communities.

This article in NSCA Coach explores the role of agility training in college baseball. Learn more on sports performance and exercise science online at NSCA.com

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.

This book excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness describes the windows of opportunity in youth athletes to time progressions in speed and agility training with their biological and chronological development.

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 excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness explains the agility considerations for different wrestling disciplines.