Eastbourne Boxing Club 👊 🥊

Agility is one of the most important skills for successful performance in sport. But most coaches aren’t taught how we can help develop this crucial skill in practice. Luckily for us there’s a 3 step framework we can use to design more effective tasks. 👇Here’s how it works Before getting into the framework I think it’s really important for coaches to understand what agility is. Agility is not carrying out a pre-planned movement, instead it involves using perception to guide actions and vice versa. The perceptual side of agility is often overlooked and it’s why you see things like the ‘T-Test’ being used to measure agility. I think this graphic by @DrBradDeWeese here captures this message here really nicely. Agility is a crucial skill in many sports, and as a coach, you want to help your athletes develop this skill to the best of their abilities. One way to do this is by designing effective training tasks that align more closely with the demands of competition. In a 2022 paper called ‘Merging Athletic Development With Skill Acquisition: Developing Agility Using an Ecological Dynamics Approach’ the authors give us a 3 stage framework we can use. Here are three stages to help you design more effective tasks for agility development: Step 1: Performance Analysis - The first step is to analyse the sport's performance demands. The purpose of this is to gain a thorough understanding of the sport and which will help to subsequent design of tasks to improve agility. This involves identifying the specific constraints of the performance environment which will then guide the creation of representative tasks. Here's an example of a template you could fill in. Step 2: Sampling the Game Demands - The second step is to sample the constraints from the competition setting. This means creating more ‘representative tasks’ using the constraints you have identified in Stage 1. A key point that the authors mention is that these tasks don’t need to be fully representative. In fact, tasks that are ‘fully representative’ can often be too challenging for players. Therefore, we use ‘scaling’ to make the tasks more suitable. For example, 1 v 1 practice tasks are more representative than a 1 v 0 practice task. Step 3: Monitor the Response - The third step is to monitor the response of your athletes to the training tasks. This means observing how your athletes respond to the tasks and making adjustments as needed. A phrase that I love from @MorrisCraig is ‘Observe to design, and design to observe’. A key role of the coach is to observe how the athletes are interacting with the practice task and see what adjustments to the task constraints are necessary. This is an ongoing cycle during the session. So to sum up the framework it's: 1. Performance Analysis 2. Sample the Game Demands 3. Monitor the Response Make sure to give the authors a follow below 👇 @jcassidy_sport @adam_gorman_1, @VinceKellySport & @woozleyoung Reference for the paper Cassidy, J., Young, W., Gorman, A., & Kelly, V. (2022). Merging Athletic Development With Skill Acquisition: Developing Agility Using an Ecological Dynamics Approach. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 10-1519.