CAP Soccer: Cone Based Agility Progression and its effect on Agility (20 yd Shuttle)

**Scott Moody, Aaron Kleinwolterink

Introduction
Training agility has always been somewhat of a mystery.  Do you teach someone how to run a faster shuttle by working on timing, steps and starting position?  Or do you attempt to train agility by working on the athlete’s foot speed and reaction by throwing out the speed ladder.  Some strength and conditioning professionals will work more classic plyometric activities into the program to develop explosive starts and transition speed.

Truth be told, there are so many components that make up what we commonly refer to as “Agility” that it makes it almost impossible to pick one or two drills and confidently say, “We are fully developing our athletes’ agility.”  In our opinion there are 4 trainable components that make up agility:

1. Body Position – The ability to control your momentum and increase efficiency of movement by keeping your body out of improper positions.
2. Strength and Power – I have lumped these 2 into 1 category because you train them with similar exercises.  You will notice the need for strength and power in agility movements when the athlete is asked to stop quickly, and then accelerate quickly in another direction.  That transition between stopping and starting will show you who is strong and powerful.
3. Foot Quickness – The quick positioning and repositioning of the feet to control momentum, initiate the stopping and starting movements, and rhythmically make adjustments to the environment.
4. Reaction Time – This is the ability to perceive what is happening and make the necessary adjustments quickly.  When you practice something so long that you can react without thinking, it becomes more like a reflex.  Now you have taken thought out of the equation and your reaction time will become more efficient.

This winter at CAP we developed a training protocol that we felt would achieve all of these goals as well as be something that would impact their play on the field, not just shuttle time.  What we came up with was a progression of exercises done with small cones or balls that taught them the mechanics of cutting, improved foot quickness, stressed body control, became plyometric at times and developed the multidirectional acceleration and deceleration type movements that they use on the field.

The results were better than we had hoped.  We were a little skeptical coming into this protocol, due to the fact that: 1) these kids were already quite fast, and 2) the ones that weren’t fast had no clue how to cut (body control). What we found was that the faster kids enjoyed the workouts due to the variety and still got faster.  The slower kids improved tremendously without much emphasis on technique.  The protocols were set up in a way that the technical nature of agility was much easier to teach and learn than it had been in the past.

Cone Progression Training Protocol:

Testing and Results:

Over the 15 week winter session we used this protocol.  Athletes were tested on week 4 for the first time.  We feel that by giving the athletes a 3 week window before the first test session it gives us a better view of true progressions made from training, rather than just those made due to learning curve.  We tested again on week 9, and again on week 14.  If an athlete did not make it to 75% of the sessions their results were thrown out.  We have used a Newtest Power Timer (electronic timer using photocells and a start switch) for the past 5 years. The group as a whole (120 athletes, Male and Female, average age of 14.9) made remarkable progress, improving on average by .18 seconds. The fastest athlete we had in the pre-test improved his time by .26 seconds to set a new record for us!  On that test day he actually ran a 4.06, 4.01 and a 3.95. These results are seen in the graph below (Figure 1).

Figure 1: W06 Improvements in Agility from a cone based, agility progression over a 10 week period. This was the fastest average pre and post test we have ever had, and the 3.95 set a new CAP record.

When we break these results down by age and gender you will notice some interesting trends.  Below are the High School Male and Female Graphs for the 10 week training session.

Figure 2: W06 Improvements in agility of High School Males over a 10 week period. The .21 second improvement in shuttle was tremendous considering that the 4.62 time was fairly quick to begin with.		Figure 3: W06 Improvements in agility in High School Females over a 10 week period.  The 4.73 average time in the post-test was impressive considering the number of girls in the study (64). We used to consider anything less than 4.90 seconds fast for girls.

Our high school male record was broken during the winter 10 week training session. The individual that broke that record also happens to be our record holder in the squat. This just reinforces our theory that strength is a critical part of agility, and simply training quick feet drills doesn’t always translate into improved performance. We had really hoped that several of our female athletes would have a chance to break our female record of 4.40. Although none of them did we did have 13 girls running in the 4.5’s or better.  In the past we have usually only had 3 or 4 run that fast. 

As for the younger population the results were also impressive.

Figure 4: W06 Improvements in agility in middle school girls. If we throw out the 2 fastest and 2 slowest our averages go to 5.16 pre-test to 4.97 post-test (.19 second improvement), and leaving us with a much more realistic view of what happened.		Figure 5: W06 Improvements in agility in middle school boys. If you throw out the 2 fastest and the 2 slowest in this group you get the exact same averages, with the bests becoming a 4.88 pre-test to a 4.77 post test. The 4.58 second shuttle ran by the 1 boy was not a valid representation of the rest of the group.

If you throw out the fast time ran by the fastest boy in these groups, you will see that the shuttle times in 11 to 13 year old males and females are almost the same. If we raced at this age it would be a toss up on which gender would come out on top.  We notice this in every day training sessions as a loss of coordination by boys at this age, while girls at this age are growing into their bodies and becoming much more rhythmic and coordinated. 

In the future we will put in much more rhythm and coordination work for the 11-13 year old boy groups.  This is something that we believe will not only help improve times in the shuttle, but overall confidence, esteem and improvement in all areas of life and sport.

Practical Applications and Comparisons:

Over the last 3 or 4 years we have tried many ways to improve agility.  Technical instruction, dot and line drills, plyometric work, explosive strength training, and combinations of all of these. After the implementation of the Cone Based Agility Progression into our standard strength and power development classes, we feel very optimistic that these drills directly impact not only the technical efficiency but also the reaction, body position and quick foot requirements of agility training. 

When you put it together into a systematic progression where 1 drill feeds into another drill and the complexity is slowly increased, the movement becomes more automatic and almost reflex oriented.  This is our goal of agility based training.  We were not only trying to get the athletes to react faster, but we wanted them to not even have to think about the movement, let it become automatic, like a reflex.

One interesting discussion point came out of this data that will drive our soccer research into the spring and summer.  We went over the youth data several times, looking at the averages, bests, top and bottom 10 percentile, etc. and what we noticed is that (with the exception of 2 females that ran in the 5.80-6 second range more due to weight issues) when they came into the program the girls were actually better than the boys.  When you look at the way they move, strength, body control, etc at this age (12-13), the girls actually are more physically mature than the boys (on average). 

The point to ponder on this relates to the neuromuscular system.  The girls may be more physically developed than the boys. They may be stronger, faster and taller on average. But how developed is their neuromuscular system? Did it develop at the same pace as their muscles, bones, etc?  To put this in the simplest terms I know how…the neuromuscular system is the connection between the brain and the muscles. This represents the brain sensing something and telling the muscles to fire a particular way, in a particular pattern, or in a particular order. 

If the body is capable of producing power or speed because of the “physical” development, but not able to control the reactive processes or firing patterns as efficiently as it needs to, does this increase the girls risk of injury?  What can we do to help develop the neuromuscular system to help prevent injuries in female athletes? These questions will drive some of our research in the spring and summer.