Secrets of Multi-Directional Speed and AgilityHey, this is Latif Thomas at complete speed training.com and today I want to talk to you about agility and multidirectional speed and agility. As you know I can attest to certainly from my athletic experience there's a different between being quick, between being fast. For me I was pretty fast. Especially once I got to full speed like I talked about in the acceleration video. I was never very quick. Playing football and basketball, sports like that, my ability to change directions quickly was not nearly as good as some of the other elements of my athletic ability so there are a number of reasons for that. As I talked about in the previous videos ultimately there are five bio motor abilities athletes need to develop if they want to maximize athletic skill. Speed, strength, flexibility, conditioning, and of course the fifth one is the one I really want to address today when we talk about multidirectional speed and agility and that's coordination.
Coordination is a critical element of training and one of the things that athletes really lack even athletes who are the most successful, I can think of countless athletes who are very successful at their sport and at several sports, but when you really broke them down and had to get them to focus on more of the smaller movements involved in being successful, they have a very difficult time because they're coordination is not where it needs to be. Coordination is best developed during the ages of nine and twelve. But we can certainly and obviously develop it at the later ages. But ideally we want to get to athletes during that time. We can develop the ability to improve our coordination. That's gonna help us change directions even when we look at addressing all the other skills I've been talking about over the course of these videos. So for today in terms of multidirectional speed and agility, of course we need to learn movement, techniques and movement skills but that goes without say. I'm certainly not denying those facts. Today I want to talk about something that you can use to develop that speed and agility that multidirectional speed and agility just about foot work and sort of start to get the baseline down for athletes. You can use this for all athletes because certainly there's not specialization or shouldn't be specialization with athletes before at the very earliest late teens or college. Among those things I think you can use to develop that coordination is agility ladder. I'm a big fan of the agility ladder, I think it can be used as long as we sort of understand what the purpose of it is. What I want to do right now is jump to the first piece of video or power point presentation that I put together recently that talks a little bit more about it then jump to some clips of complete speed training where we can see how you can use an agility ladder and some things you can do in a little more of a fun way than to just blast through the agility ladder and why athletes have a tough time sometimes with the agility ladder and how you can address that. So let's take a look at complete speed training program and give you some more information so you can start applying this information to your next practice with your athletes. Now, I think agility ladders get a bad rap because people look at it too literally and they say oh, it doesn't specifically simulate game condition so therefore agility ladders are no good. I don't agree with that. I think if you look at them in context like most things, you can see certainly a great value in agility ladder so I don't think they need to be directly simulating game situations. What you're trying to do is develop ‑‑ quite frankly, develop their multidirectional ‑‑ excuse me. Develop their coordination, their multidirectional speed moving forward or backwards laterally. Something along those lines. If you can do that, if you can teach athletes that, it's gonna begin to transition over to the competitions and game situations because they have better body awareness. Better control of what they're doing. Better brains don't have to work so hard to process information so certainly agility ladder is a very affective way to begin to develop these skills. The thing about agility ladder is they're great as a workout. You can do them as a workout of itself or as part of the warm up. I'll even use agility drills for my track athletes who certainly don't need a lot of multidirectional speed agility unless they're playing other sports. I do want to switch things up during the prep phases and recovery day something along those lines. Another thing I like to do with agility ladder drills before I get into some actually footage from complete speed training is play games with the agility ladder. One thing you'll find with young athletes in the agility ladder is they like to blast through it. They're going through that thing like they're on fire. What we need to do is slow them down a little bit. I don't know if you remember the game operation, I may be dating myself a bit here but the game operation was this board game. I forget who made it. Maybe Milton Bradly. It's not even important. But the purpose of the game was you had to take a pair of basically like tweezers and go inside this quote unquote body and try to pull the bones out. If you touch the side of the operating area I guess you could call it, the buzzer went off and the guys nose lit up and it scared you a little bit. It buzzed. So that's the game I like to play with the agility ladder because athletes to get to the slow down especially when I do a lot of relays with athletes if I'm working with groups of athletes. It gets athletes to slow down a little bit and pay attention so I tell them if you touch my ladder, if you kick the ladder, you have to start over and get back in the line. This forces them to slow down a little bit because they don't want to have to start over and do it over again. So it really forces them to be really aware of what's going on. Their body awareness etc. Also not try to be a hero and blast through it kicking the ladder all over the place. So really focus on the agility ladder I think it's a great tool to use and those who down play the agility ladder are missing the point a little bit. Now, the agility ladder drills are extremely important that you slow athletes down and give them some good cues on how to get in and out of the ladder and navigate the ladder because they're gonna go in and be very uncoordinated and they're gone in have a much more difficult time negotiating the ladder than you think they will.
Another thing that you want to do when you're going through the agility ladder is you want to make sure that athletes are getting an equal number of repetitions in leading with each leg with each left and right leg. Athletes who have a coordinated leg and a strong leg will prefer and you'll see very quickly to go through the ladder with one leg or the other and that one leading with the left leg for example will be much easier and quicker and more coordinated than leading with the other. So please make sure that you create symmetry with the way they work out. Once they've gone through the agility ladder learn some things like you can see here in these drills complete speed training you can do what we call hybrids and even here where the orange cone is, you can have a soccer ball, throw a football, pass a basketball, throw a baseball, there are a number of things you can do to make it a little bit more sport specific as the athletes learn to negotiate and navigate the ladder to add more complexity for your more advanced athletes. As you can see here this athletes going through quicker and doing more complicated drills so in a complete speed training we cover 26 different agility ladder drills and exercises that you can go through and as you get those down and progress from simple to complex, you can just jump right in the beginning and in doing that, you really are limited only by your imagination as you go through and add new drills and new functions and formats and variations to the drills. So keep that in mind as you go through. Use an agility ladder, it's a great way to develop speed agility and particularly coordination.
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