A close look at what it takes to dramatically improve your speed, agility and quickness for all sports!

Speed, agility, and quickness (SAQ) drills are something that tends to become a topic of heated discussion. Many coaches feel that the effort put forth during sport is sufficient to improve these elements of performance.

Their thought is that you cannot get any more sport specific than performing the sport itself. With this being said, by training that sports skills, you are developing the set of athletic skills specifically related to that sport. Many of these coaches produce exceptional athletes that can compete on any level.

The other school of coaching tends to believe that component training, or breaking skills down into pieces, is the best way to go about athletic enhancement. These individuals have been known to produce exceptional athletes as well.

I have a tendency to subscribe to the latter school of though, and I will tell you why. I feel that human movement can be very complex. The simple act of walking involves in-depth motor programming, most of (if not all) tends to run on the reflexive level.

By reflexive I mean that you do not have to think to walk. If you had to think about every muscles action while you walked it would take you days to get from the couch to the refrigerator.

This programming starts to develop as an infant. You learn to do very basic skills, and as you mature, the programming becomes more complicated as does the movement.

Motor learning research tells us that you go through different stages of learning as you acquire new skill. Some skills are similar to others, so we are able to skip some initial stages, while others must start from the beginning. Some skills may take years to develop while others may take only weeks.

When we ask our body to perform an unfamiliar or poorly developed skill, it tends to do so very inefficiently. We typically lack the motor programming necessary to effectively coordinate the skill. How many hours of practice have we put into shooting a free throw, throwing a baseball, kicking a football, etc. We start training for these sports as 3-4 year olds, and are still improving when we go to college.

Many athletes tend to go through rather limited development. They have spent very little time working on proper movement mechanics, coordination, and perceived exertion skills. This gets complicated by the fact that most individuals like to work on skills that they are already comfortable performing. They never develop their weakness.

I feel that SAQ drills can help program or reprogram these deficiencies. I think that breaking down gross movement skills into components allows us to cognitively address issues that tend to be reflexive. By decreasing the scope of your training we can work on individual issues that would be to over whelming as a whole.

I don’t feel like the human brain has the capacity to multi-task and efficiently refine individual skill. I would have to ask how many individuals were thinking about improving their SAQ while they were in a confrontation situation such as being guarded during a lay up.

If you asked most athletes what they were thinking during confrontational activity (which is the essence sport) they would say, I don’t really remember thinking of anything. I just did what was natural.

They just functioned on preprogrammed information. They functioned reflexively, maybe not efficiently, but definitely reflexively. I would have to ask, did this athlete really develop any mechanical skill during this situation? He may have developed some psychological skill. He may have learned how to deal better with the psychological stresses involved in confrontation, but I really doubt much else.

By using SAQ drills, we can try to fine tune this preprogrammed information. I like to tell my athletes that I want their motor programming to be able to handle any and all footwork that is humanly possible.

If they never find their feet in unfamiliar territory, they are running on adequate programming. If they lack the coordination to perform certain footwork drills as an isolated component, they lack the ability to perform them when they are integrated into chaotic confrontation. It will be during these instances that the individual will not be performing at an optimal level.

Part II of this series will deal with the actual neural acceleration (quickness) elements I utilize in my Developing the Multidimensional Athlete protocol. I will be discussing how and why I utilize the specific drills within each section.

Copyright 2002 by Progressive Sporting Systems.

Tony owns and operates Progressive Sporting Systems in Terre Haute Indiana. He can be contacted by email at: tonyreynolds@pssathletics.com or through his website: PssAthletics.com