[♪] thank you doug for that long andvery kind introduction, and thank you everybody for coming. i realize, thatin these events, you have many talks to choose from, so i'm very humbled that youdecided to come into this one. what i want to do is look at speed andagility performance, but look at it very much from the game context. i want thegame context to actually provide the frame of reference against which we canplan what movements we need to do, assess how effective those movements are,plan the progressions, because, ultimately, we want -- what we want to do isto make people better on the field. and,
this is developed over time from medoing a lot of various agility drills and, kind of wondering, well, am i making adifference? is there a better way of doing it? why i think this is important is thatmost of us would probably agree that speed and agility will play a major rolein the vast majority of team and court sports. invariably, the question i'm askedwhen athletes come in is - is can you make me faster? but when i look at it, it'swhat they mean by that? and quite often, what they mean by thatand what we perceive to mean by that, they're actually quite different. because make mefaster to us means enhance 10-meter
dash, enhance 40-yard dash. make me moreagile means enhance performance on an agility test. for them, it actuallymeans help me play the game better. help me score more goals. help me make morebreaks. help me make more tackles, and so on. and, sometimes i feel there's adichotomy within those. what we see and what they see a quite different. now why is this view, why is thisperspectival view important? well, to me, the way in which we viewsomething will affect the way in which we train it. so if i believe agility issomething, that is the way i'll train it. if i believe -if loren believes it tobe something else, he'll train
in it in a slightly different way. so ifour definitions and our ways of seeing something aren't on the same level as theathletes, perhaps we're missing something. so a lot of what i'm going to talk abouttoday is very much can we supplement our program? i am not here -- i had thepleasure speaking to lauren over breakfast a day or so ago -- and both ofus agreed, basic acceleration work is still and will always be a major part ofour program. but how do we supplement that? how do we make the transfer? so let's take a look at the agility.let's go into a classic definition of agility - the ability to explosively breakand change direction.
okay, it's in all the textbooks. one of thebeauties of this is easy to measure. so we can tell if we're getting better atdoing that type of movement pattern, but is there more to the way in which wemove on the sports field than just that? to me, that's kind of misses a lot of thecontext of agility. 2006, jeremy chef and warren young took that a whole stepfurther because they looked at it as a rapid whole body movement in reaction toa stimulus. so that kind of brought in the concept of reactive agility. has itmoved agility forward? i believe it has, yes. but, there isstill, to me, a little bit of a danger, because we just think that if we'veadded a reactive element that it must be
better. but what if that reactive elementis resulted in the movement pattern that isn't reflected in sport? what if it's asking us to reflect onstimuli that bid no resemblance to what the sport is going to play? have wethen enhanced our practice or are we just starting to waste time? so i came up withthis ridiculously long definition of what i call game speed, and trust me, thisis not to bring more definitions into the field. lord knows we've got enough definitions.but it's to help us frame what i think weneed to be doing with our speed and
agility training. so i see it as acontext-specific movement. so that immediately takes me that i have to lookat the context before i can say whether somebody is -is effective or not. wherethe aim is to maximize sports performance. so the aim now is not ameasure of agility or measure of speed it's actually aimed at enhancing thesports performance of that athlete wherever the sport is, and it's theapplication of sports-specific movement of optimal velocity. now that seems strange.in a speed and agility talk that i'm talking about optimal velocityrather than maximum velocity, but think of all the movements that we do in sport.many of them are at a position we're
waiting to react to a stimulus. now if weare out of control, at that point, we can't react effectively. we could losea yard in first step. now how, you know, we've all done speed training, ittakes an awful lot to get somebody a yard faster, but if i'm losing that because ihaven't got control then that's an easy win for me. i can picksomething up very, very quickly and enhance performance without the needsnecessarily of making somebody that much faster. the optimal velocity precisionefficiency control in anticipation of and in reaction to stimulus. so this nowframes the way in which i view speed and agility training. i look at anymovement, so when i see an agility drill,
and i think will that be useful for my athletes? i goto the sport. i look at the sport. i look at the way they move. and then, i canevaluate it against that. rather than saying, yup, you know, it's got change ofdirection, must be agility. it must be useful for me. now science, and you know, i work in the university, so i'm infinitely involved with this, it's madean immeasurable difference in strength and conditioning. but, this is what wetend to say, if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. so our quest always inscience is to measure something, so we can see tangible results with ourtraining. the challenge, if i go into my
game speed definition is that many ofthose things control precision. it's very difficult to measure with the currenttechnology that we have. so what we've always done is that we've gone -- if wethink of, is somebody agile? it's timed. what does that instruct our athlete to do?move quickly irrelevant to the control that you have as you do it. so how many of us have seen tests likethe t-test -- and i'm going to use this afternoon -- where people fall over at theend of it? where people look, okay, they may be moving quick, but they're so out ofcontrol that if you ask them to perform a sport skill, they simply wouldn't beable to do it. so in my quest of measurements,
am i losing the view of what the athletewants, in terms of, sports performance? so, to me, this is the typical approach thatwe do. our definition of what we view agility as leads us to the measures ofwhat is good, of what is bad, and that leads us to the drills. so think of howmany drills that you may have done over the years where the only advice you cangive is to move faster. you're going through the ladders, do it faster. you'regoing over the hurdles, do it faster. is that necessarily the case, or are wemissing something? now, i'm going to put a couple ofexamples of soccer up. i'm going to put a couple examples of lionel messi up. an absolutegenius on the football field. now, because
of our scientific view, because of ourdefinitional view of agility, i think that we take a physical approach. so whenwe try to explain somebody's performance, we'll take the physical. he'sgood cause he's strong. he's good cause he's fast. he's good cause he's good on these agilitytests. but is that always the case? how many of us have come up against anathlete, who's good on paper, but doesn't look that quick? but, man, he can play the game.or, he's not that strong, but gee, he can run, he can jump, he can do everything thatis needed. and, when we look at the correlational studies between strengthand speed, there're never as high as we'd expect them to be. when we go intostrength and agility, there are even lower.
when we go into strength and reactiveagility, they're kind of thinking, is it helping at all? now, it's easy for us to explain awaycontradictions. oh, yeah, but yeah. it's a fault inthe study. or is there actually something happening? because,quite often, intuition and an innovation will come when we look at thesecontradictions. when we say, hang on there, there's a pattern starting to emergehere. to me, quite clearly, something else is going on. so messi, probably the best football player on theplanet. is he the strongest? i doubt it. on a
10-yard dash, 40-yard dash, would he be thequickest? i doubt it. would he come up as best on all of the agility drills? i'mnot so sure. but he damn is a good footballer. so, to me, that's giving meclues that if this is the only thing i'm doing maybe i'm missing something. now with my definition, and when willstart getting into the words of control, and so on, it's difficult to measure. its nottangible. but, does that mean i should ignore it? because, scientificallywe would say, if you can't measure it,
it's not there. we've got to go somewhereelse. and then, i read this quote, which is attributed to einstein, i don't know if itactually his, "not everything that counts, can be counted, not everything that canbe counted, counts." so just because we currently can't measure it, doesn't meanthat we shouldn't focus on it in our coaching. similarly, just because we're taking timeit doesn't necessarily mean that it is the be-all and end-all of agilityperformance. so, to me, we have to be happy with a certain level of uncertainty. aslong as we're seeing tangible changes on the field of play, i think we're doingour job. so quite often athletes have
come to me and they've said, you know, thisstuff is working, because, and they've never given me a test score as evidence. i'm starting to get three in the box. nobody's getting past me anymore. that, tome, has to be evidence. now it's very difficult to scientifically publish that,and so on, but, if that consistently happens, then maybe i'm doing somethingright. so this leads us to a point, do we needto rethink the way in which we develop agility? do we need to add things in thathelp us get this specific context? so it goes back to the same question, what doeshe want from us? and it's simple,
he wants to be a better player. we've thengot to give him the tools to be able to enhance that playing performance. but, what's going to help him play thegame more effectively? now you can think of this, whatever sportyou play, what makes a great basketball player great? what makes a great footballplayer great? those are the key things that we need tofocus on, and our speed and agility are towards that objective. now, invariably,if you want great sport, and when it came out this morning, djokovic and gasquetjust started, and then there's the big federer / andy murray game this afternoon,what fantastic movers on the court. so
their movement contributes to theirability to play those games. but, it's not just the speed. when they reach thoseendpoints, they have such control that they can play shots that we can onlydream of. they can reach balls, that again, we canonly dream of. so our objectives must be game-related.now if that's the case, that means we have to rethink the way in which we'relooking at and developing agility. so we have to think not at how necessarilywell we have to make people in tests, and, you know, i'm not contradicting thefact that you've got to, especially with the combine system that you guys have,you've got to help people do the test.
but ultimately, we've also got to helpmaximize the transfer to the sports performance. so the logic is, where do westart? we have to start with the end in mind. wehave to start at the sport. so let's have a look at basketball, and i'm no experton basketball. but, defensive role or offensive role? that's a defensive role. the way i look at it then is what couldhappen next? could potentially lay-up shot. could potentially drive. so in a defensive position you have to be ableto respond to all of those potential movements. that's what gives me my drills.so when i put somebody in athletic
position, i think, right, basketball whatcould happen next? they've got to be able to jump. they've got to be able to movelaterally. they've got to be able to drop, and so on. you can start to see how thatstarts my drill development sequence, by looking immediately at the sport. now youcan start to see who this would be different. if joe drove at me that wayand i took a lateral step, would it be a narrow step or relatively wide step? it'll be arelatively wide step. would it be a high step or a low step? it'll be a low step. now let'shave a look at some of the drills that we would say as a lateral agility drills.oh, sorry wrong one. how do i take that? that one. suddenly, that movement pattern doesn'tlook like anything like that movement
pattern that the athlete is going to do.another drill. suddenly, that movement pattern doesn't look anything like whati'm going to get at this point. so this is why i'm starting to question how someof our drills, because we're not game focused, maybe taking us away. so if ispend the next month, getting an athlete good at that and good at that and good atthat, am i actually helping 'em do that? that'san easy, big question. so am i helping? maybe not. i'm i hindering?so are we missing the big picture, because we're starting with definitions.do we now need to flip and look at other things? so effective movement, and youwill hear
tv commentators use these all the time,words such as controlled, task-oriented, precise, efficient, of optimal velocity,frequent adjustments. do you think that's the case? i believe so. can we measure anyof those? probably not. a lot of the research says that great athletes arethose that make frequent adjustments, so subtle that you often can't pick him up,but that's why they're constantly in a good position to play the game, butthey're very, very difficult to see. so what we need to be able to think, it'scan we come up with drills that develop those capacities? one of the things i'dheard last week in tennis was, they've stopped moving their feet,they're not getting into a good position
to play the shot. and that's the elitelevel player. because when do our movement patterns breakdown? underpressure and under fatigue. so we've got to make them so good that they with-stand. now, if we're not practicing these, then they're not going to be ableto stand the pressure. so let's have a look at what goes on in the game. and, to me,the key is this, athletes solve problems. essentially, every potential situation isunique. so why would it look similar? he's never faced that position where theball is in the same position, the opposition are in the same position, andso on. so at all times there are multiple processes going on.this perception, perception of positions
ball, opposition, teammates, and so on,that is constantly being processed. so these aren't one way arrows. these arearrows that are constantly changing in terms of, all right, where's the opposition? okay, i can see they're closing in. now i need to do something different. its motor action selection. sometimes ourdrills already do that for the athlete. we tell them, we're going to run there, we'regonna turn at that corner, we're gonna run off. how doing they know when to select thebest movement? which ones are going to help them transfer best? and then it'sthe motive action application. so how much are we currently missing? i wouldguess that we do a lot of this, but maybe
not so much. and if you can see behind,your attention is probably naturally drawn to the offensive athlete.they're not these arrows in the way, but have a look at how these defensiveplayers are completely out of good position. hence, the attempted grab totry to stop the guy from going through. so what he has managed to do is getthese guys out of good position. what we've got to make sure it is that thatdoesn't happen as much as possible. so to me, it's time to change the paradigm. instead of starting with the definitions and moving forward, i think we've got tostart with a game, break down the key
tasks that determine success in the game,and then build the exercises progressively around these tasks. so italmost flips everything. so instead of starting with our definitions, and scottwas doing a similar thing in his talk earlier, we've got to understand thegame. we've got to understand what the athlete needs to achieve before we canrandomly go in and do all these drills, because it best we can have littleeffect. at worst we may be hindering their athletic development. so wegot to start with a sport. what are the tasks? now if i'm playingbasketball, soccer, football, separation. if i can get separation, offensively,
i'm a pretty good athlete. so ifsomebody's standing in front of me i want to be able to get separation aseffectively as i possibly can. what's the converse of that defensively?they want to stop that. they want to be able to close those gaps. so theindicators of success would then be how much separation can i actually get? whatare the constraints? well, if i'm working with footballers it'sbrutal. it's head on tactic. so when i'm looking at defensive situations i'vegot to make sure that the athlete is in the position where they can makethose tackles, if it's soccer. if it's basketball, it's certainly different. theycan get away with different footwork
patterns. and then, that leads me to themovements that i need to be able to do it and i've got my initiation movement. i wantto be able to start a movement to the front, to the side, to the rear. i want to be able to change directionback, forward, side, side. i want to be able to accelerate. i want to be able to get tomax speed, but also, i want to be able to have my transition movements. my athleticposition. my jogged athletic position. my moving laterally, moving to the rear,moving diagonally, and so on. what i want to do then for those of you areable to make the practical, we're going to try to put this theoreticalelement into a sample practical session.
so that's my reverse engineering process.i'm starting with the sport and i'm working backwards. so when i look at thesport, there's a danger. most of us are ball watches. we watchwhat goes on on the ball. think of it, every time we watch sport, wefollow the ball. a lot of great movement and key movementhappens off the ball. so that when we watch a sport and we try to break downmovement patterns, we can't just watch what happens on the ball. so when my team is in possession, i've gotit, but there are people moving everywhere. so quite often, when you seesomebody in space, it's not because what
they've done that second, it's what theydid two seconds previously when they were off the ball. they've seen what's coming on. they've madetheir move. they're into space. i also need to look at what happens out ofpossession. so if there's space somebody's missed their task somewhere. and quite oftenthose things come down to movement deficiencies or movement mistakes, notjust technical mistakes. and this is where you as movement experts have ahuge input into helping teams because team sports and team cultures will alwayssee a technical issue in relation to what they know, which tends to be thetechniques of the game. but i watch it at
premier level back home, there aremovement mistakes every week which leads to critical factors in the game. and it'sour job, we've got a capacity to really help that as we go through.now this is opened up something that i'm not really going to talk about todaywhich is, which is where i'm going to at the moment, which is offensive anddefensive agility. defensive is very reactive. always making sure that we'rein a good position. offensive is all about pattern interruption. so as i run at somebody, i want toput doubt in their mind. i want them to get out of a natural pattern of movement, andideally, get them into a bad position.
that's going to take skills that weprobably never work on. so if you think about our speed work, dowe include slight curves within our run? because if i run at doug, and i just curvemy run a little bit, suddenly i have interrupted his pattern. he doesn't know what'sgoing on. from there i can then make my cut. as i do that cut, how can imanipulate my body initially to send doug in the opposite way to which i want?so all these offensive skills are going to open up huge new avenues for us tohelp athletes within their, within their sport. so we got to practice them. so, ofall these things, how hands-on heart can we say that we practice themconsistently, that we have a strategy and
the system in place where we can addressall of these components? or do we just pick and choose? danger with pick and choosingis you know which athletes, which movement patterns that are going to suffer.they're going to be the ones we don't train. so whilst there is a huge amount ofliterature developing on motor skill learning, and it's going to changedrastically over the next 10 years, i think, and really impactstrength and conditioning. one that comes consistently through is that the key toskill learning is the amount of quality practice. and if we can construct qualitypractice there and do it consistently, we are going to give our athletes a big, bigadvantage. so i want to get in now into a
little bit of my old theory on whatmakes quality practice. so if we have a look at the current literature, and as isaid, this is emerging. the work on motor control is one of the greatunknowns. so we can probably do at the moment is have a closure at, and say at,this point it appears that these elements give us an advantage whenit looks at motor learning. over the next ten years, over the next five years, this maychange drastically as more and more research -- the challenge is a lot of theresearch is done in the theoretical, on very unrealistic tasks like balancing onswing boards, and so on. it hasn't come into the mainstream ofsport yet, but it doesn't mean, as i said,
we've got to deal with that uncertainty.it doesn't mean that we shouldn't should ignore it at this point. so what makes good practice? number oneit needs to be strategic. i need to have my list ofmovements and have my list of tasks, have my lists of capabilities and address them ona consistent basis, through a week through a month, through a year, through awhole development program. and scott was alluding to how he does that interms of taking athletes from the beginning stage up, up until mastery. itneeds to be progressive challenge. what it seems is that the more cognitiveinvolvement that we get, the better the
learning. despite the fact that, initially,performance may be down. it needs to be variable. it needs to be on the edge ofcapacity. mistakes need to be expected in our training environment. it is not aperfect environment. i want the athletes to make the mistakes there not in thegame. i want them exposed to the kind ofchallenges that they are going to get in the game in training. i never want, "oh, i'venever seen anything like that before, gee whiz." and you suddenly lost by 20points because they've not been accustomed to those things. as i said earlierthere needs to be an element of cognitive processing to it all. there needs to be randomallocation. so we're not just doing
the same thing all the time. if you think ofa lot of the agility drills that we do, how often they are just going throughthem? very little cognitive, very littlechallenge, very little progression. can we make it better? it needs ideally an external focus. itseems that if you focus your intention in words it actually inhibits yourability to move. so if i'm giving a lot of focus it, okay, flex your hips. that, kind of, doesn't help theathlete. where as if i can give an external focus, back side against the wall. theyfind it easier to do. and a thing that's
often thrown at me is, yeah, okay, thisstuff is great, but they do that by play in the game. yes, they do, but they don't do itrepeatedly. so if i want to develop my cuttingcapabilities, i can't let the game do that, because wemay only do that once in three weeks. whereas, if i can bring those type ofelement into my training, i can do them repeatedly over time and get thatlearning that we need to enhance. so let's take our typical drill basedapproach. with our physical hat on, it's okay. with our skill-based hat on,how many of those factors that i was
alluding to are present in that? and we'retalking about very few. now when we take task-based exercises, where we givepeople a task that somehow relates to the movement and some are related to thegame, can you see how suddenly it opens up an awful lot of these. so it makes sense,on a context-specific basis, but i think it also makes sense on motor learningbasis. now is that saying that we should, we should completely get ridof all of these closed drills? no, i'm not saying that. what i am saying is, can wesupplement those strategically to enhance the transfer and potentially toenhance the learning of the athletes?
because what i want is an athlete thatcan go onto the field and solve the problems. they come up against loren landow, he's lightning-quick, but god, he can't change direction. it's only an assumption.suddenly i've done right. i've got, then got the movement tools cause i faced thatkind of athlete before. i know how to defend them. i give them a little bitmore space, show him the outside, close him down. jay dawes on the other hand is notthat quick, but gee, he can change direction. it's a different strategy, but i need to learnthose strategies in training, and i think these ways actually help us get it. so what i'm proposing is what i call atask based approach. so this drill here,
which we will do this afternoon,simple knee and hip tag game. what's it trying to get? its trying toget the athlete to constantly be in an athletic position, with their eyes up, andadjusting the hip position in relation to the athlete. so this is part of ourprogression from simple jockeying through to game tasks. is it perfect? noit's not. but, do they have to concentrate? is there cognitive involvement? yes. is itprogressive? yes. is it varied? yes. is it random? are they externally focused? yousee how a lot of those learning things are coming in and being, kind of,ticking boxes quite nicely. so, to me, what the task based approaches is the use ofmovement based challenges to develop
context specific movement capacity. it'sjust a different way of looking at the challenge of developing agility. so what i do, what are the skills? it could be a change of direction skill.it could be a deceleration skill. it could be acceleration drill. i have alook what then the athlete actually needsto be able to do, to do it well. what are the key perceptual triggers that exist?what are the task constraints? are we putting this in a basketball context, afootball context, a tennis context, and then we designed the drill around that. soquite often this same drill will look
subtly different depending upon thesport context that i'm working with. and, interestingly, despite the fact that i'mtalking about sports specificity, when we actually reverse things, we find aremarkable similarity in fundamental capacities. what i call sports genericmovements. so that ability to change direction that i keep going on about, isgoing to be useful to a football player? yes. a soccer player? yes. a basketballplayer? yes. a netball player? pretty much any team sport, it's going to be in there.so i can even do multiple sports type sessions, where we work on these kinds oftasks, and then we can apply them at a later date.
so the key to it is progressingchallenges. this is my drill. how do i make it more challenging? solet's take changing direction. i use a concept that i call degrees of freedom.the aim initially will be to establish the basic pattern. we'll show them howit's done. slow pace. we'll build the pace up. butthen we need more. so at this point then when they'recompetent there we can start to add what i'll call a temporal or spatial variance.so if you look at the athlete coming in at this point, he's running in, he'swaiting for me the signal, i give him a little signal, and away he goes in thatdirection. i can change that signal up.
it could be that if i move that way, he'sgot to go the opposite way. it's a little bit more sports specific. into asports generic task, my attempt to get past joe because if i don't, i could bein dire trouble. and then, we can add the sport specificity to it with where theplayers, the directions they're coming in, the distances in between, and so on. sowe're taking what looks like a very simple skill, but by using these degreesof freedom it helps us to progress it into what looks very sports-specific. nowone of the byproducts of all of this is what i'll call buy-in. now when youwork with rugby players, when you work the footballers, they take strength andconditioning for granted.
you don't have to sell it. if, back home,when we work with soccer players we have to sell strength and conditioningmassively. "well, what's all this weight lifting and stuff do going do for me?how's it going to help?" and, so on. and sometimes it's a hard sell because thosecapacities are cornerstones, but they don't transfer directly all the time.this stuff, when they start to see this, they're, "i can see that. that's going tohelp me." the other thing that i'veexperienced with it it helps coaches as well. because, if we've been practicingthis and then suddenly a player goes in the game makes a great cut, you say, hey,we practice that. maybe there's
something in that, that weird andwonderful stuff that you do. and all of those bit-by-bit help justify the workthat you do as a strength and conditioning coach. but, and this is a massive but, thesedrills alone won't do the trick because they rely on your coaching capability. you've got to know what these techniquesshould look like. you've got to be able to observe and evaluate immediately. seeas many of those --so why is that not working? look at your foot position. look at your knee position. and then, give the athletes the abilities to help them solve theproblems. and one of the things i've kind
of gone to a lot is a lot morequestioning, a lot almost suggestion rather than telling immediately that's -that's what you need to do. sothat they can start to figure that out, because when they are on the field youare not on there with them. they're on an island. so you need to be able to helpthem have those skills to be able to solve those problems. and that, to me, iswhat we can do. so it's not just doing random agility drills, reactive agilitydrills, it's having a purpose but coaching them. knowing what they should look likeand being able to develop that athlete's performance towards mastery. now whetherwe ever get mastery, we spoke of this
loren, is -is doubtful. even the great,greatest athletes movement patterns will break down at some point. what we've gotto do is try to get that probability of break down as low as we possibly can. so,in summary, what i think this does, thinking through game speed brings acontextual focus. it forces us to look at the way the movement works in the game. utilizing tasks seems to maximizelearning. at the moment it ticks the box of the current theory on motor controland learning, but it must be combined with effective coaching. it's not a cure-all. it is a tool. a tool that we supplementour other things with to hopefully help
-help our athletes transfer into sports performance. thank you very much.
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