For many years, agility was defined as the ability to decelerate, accelerate, and rapidly change direction. It is a reasonable description of the physical locomotor tasks that are performed when an athlete needs to change direction quickly. But while pre-planned changes of direction do happen in sports, these rapid cutting movements more commonly occur in response to game-specific stimuli (e.g. the body cues presented by an opponent).
More than 20 years ago, Young et al. [4] provided a model of agility for team sport athletes (Figure 1). They highlighted that physical factors, such as technique (e.g. foot placement, adjustment of strides to accelerate and decelerate, body positioning), straight sprinting speed, and leg muscle qualities (e.g. strength, power, and reactive strength) contributed to pre-planned change of direction speed. However, they also demonstrated that “agility” required perceptual and decision-making factors. These factors include visual scanning, anticipation, pattern recognition, and situational knowledge. Across a wide range of team and fast ball sports, these decision-making factors have been shown to discriminate between higher- and lesser-skilled athletes [1].
Perceptual and Decision-Making Qualities Can Be Tested…
In several different sports, experts have been shown to anticipate more effectively than novices, due in part to their ability to detect useful advanced information (or cues), and disregard irrelevant cues [1]. Importantly, these expert-novice differences have typically been observed in the absence of any significant expert-novice differences in tests of general reaction time, visual acuity, and depth perception [1]. Recently, we tested higher- and lesser-skilled team sport athletes on a wide range of pre-planned change of direction speed tests and a reactive agility test that required players to “read and react” to game-specific cues [3]. Higher-skilled players had faster movement and decision times on the reactive agility test (indicating a better ability to read and react to game-specific cues), but no differences were observed between groups for pre-planned change of direction speed (Table 1).
When Training Reactive Cutting Movements, Pre-Planned Tasks Won’t Cut It!
The above findings clearly demonstrate that higher-skilled team sport athletes have superior perceptual and decision-making qualities, contributing, at least in part to better agility. However, some practitioners still continue to use non-specific cues (e.g. arrows that flash onto a screen directing a player to move in a specific direction, flashing lights that players must move towards) to develop “reactive agility”. This is despite the fact that non-specific drills do not improve the game-specific reactive agility of team sport athletes. As an example, we have used video-based perceptual training to develop the ability of softball in-fielders to identify the direction that a ball would be hit, from the advanced cues provided by the batter (Figure 2) [2]. A second placebo group trained with arrows that flashed onto a screen, directly them to move in a specific direction, and were told “this will give you fast feet”, while a third group acted as non-training controls. Following 4 weeks of training, the video-based perceptual training group had superior decision accuracy and faster decision times than both the placebo and control groups. Importantly, these improvements in anticipatory skill transferred to the field environment and were retained after a 4-week, non-training period.
Why Are These Findings Important?
When returning an athlete to competition following a major injury (e.g. an ACL repair), the restoration of movement quality is critical. When (re)training agility qualities, inclusion of fundamental pre-planned changes of direction movements is important. There may also be a case for reintroducing athletes into non-specific reactive movements (e.g. responding to light displays), to gauge movement quality in tasks that are not pre-planned. However, there is limited correlation among pre-planned changes of direction qualities, non-specific reactive tasks, and the ability to read and react to game-specific cues – performance on pre-planned and non-specific tasks are not related to game-specific reactive agility qualities, nor do they transfer to game-specific situations.
What Can Rehab Professionals Do to Improve Outcomes for Athletes Returning to Sports with Cutting-Based Movements?
Rehab professionals need to restore movement qualities to ensure injured athletes can safely return to the unpredictable, open-skilled tasks of their sport. In order to improve long-term outcomes and reduce re-injury risk:
- Think of agility as a continuum of qualities that incorporate movement (e.g. acceleration, deceleration, changing direction) and decision-making factors (e.g. anticipation, situational knowledge) (Figure 3). An over reliance on one quality at the expense of another will result in players being under-prepared for the untrained task.
- Ensure fundamental movement skill (re)training underpins the return to agility process. If athletes cannot move well in closed, pre-planned movements, they will not move well in open, unpredictable tasks involving higher cognitive demands.
- Incorporate game-specific “read and react” drills into the return-to-sport process. If rehab professionals focus solely on pre-planned change of direction factors, then at best, they will only solve half of the agility challenge!
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References
- Abernethy B. (1987). Anticipation in sport: A review. Physical Education Review, 10:5-16.
- Gabbett T, Rubinoff M, Thorburn L, Farrow D. (2007). Testing and training anticipation skills in softball fielders. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 2:15-24.
- Gabbett TJ, Kelly JN, Sheppard JM. (2008). Speed, change of direction speed, and reactive agility of rugby league players. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 22:174-181.
- Young WB, James R, Montgomery I. (2002). Is muscle power related to running speed with changes of direction? Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 42:282-288.
