Improve Agility Drills with Cognitive Challenges: Why & How
Agility is a fundamental skill in nearly all sports, but it’s often trained incorrectly as a purely physical quality like speed, strength, or flexibility. Here we will explain how increasing the cognitive challenge of your agility drills can enhance your training by developing quicker decision making, faster movement execution, and better transfer to your sport.
What is Agility?
Specific organismic, task, and environmental constraints influencing an individual athlete's agility performance (Spiteri et al. 2018)
Agility was recently redefined as “a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus” (Sheppard, 2006). The “response to a stimulus” was added to differentiate it from change of direction (COD), which involves only performing physical movements in a pre-planned environment. True agility must also incorporate cognitive abilities associated with perception and decision-making because athletes in most sports (like team ball sports) must perform movements in an unpredictable environment where they’re constantly reacting and adapting to ever-changing external cues. Recent research even suggests that this decision-making ability separates higher and lower-level athletes. This comes from tests showing that higher-level athletes perform better on true “reactive” agility tests than lower-level athletes, but the same does not apply to pre-planned change of direction speed tests (Lockie et al., 2014).
Cognition in Sports
Sports naturally present athletes with complex scenarios that involve higher-level cognitive processing. Some of these include:
Selective Attention - The ability to focus on task-relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information.
Example - A basketball player focusing on defending a ball-handler while ignoring the crowd.
Attention Switching - The ability to unconsciously shift focus between one task and another.
Example - A soccer player turning the ball over and immediately switching their attention from attacking to defending.
Impulse Control - The ability to resist impulses, delay gratification, and inhibit responses.
Example - An American football player resisting the urge to react to the deceptive movement of their opponent.
Cognitive Flexibility - The ability to adapt to unpredictable or new concepts or events.
Example - A lacrosse player being surprisingly pressured by multiple defenders and having to find a way to get out.
Working memory - The ability to think, compare, and make a decision.
Example - A hockey player taking directions from their coach while skating and effectively implementing them.
One common flaw with most agility training is that they predominantly rely on reacting to simple cues (an arrow pointing in a certain direction, a coach saying “go,” etc.) that only challenge basic processing speed rather than these higher-level cognitive functions. This method lacks ecological validity because it doesn't represent the type of processing athletes do during their sport (Buchel et al., 2022). By incorporating more complex cues, we can improve both perceptual-cognitive and motor components of agility in a way that better transfers to the sport.
How to Add Cognitive Challenges to Agility Training
When adding cognitive challenges to your agility drills, it's important to remember that the brain is highly interconnected, so cognitive domains are not turned on and off like light switches. Instead, they’re more like volume knobs because they can be increased or decreased depending on the task or environmental constraints. Here is a practical framework (developed by Spiteri et al. 2018) for creating an effective training environment for agility:
Name a perceptual-cognitive skill an athlete has to make in competition.
Manipulate environmental and task constraints (stimulus position, stimulus type, rules, outside distractions, etc.) to train this skill.
Incorporate directional instruction to guide the athlete’s attentional focus to the perceptual-cognitive skill.
We also suggest ensuring the stimulus positioning (where you'll be looking for information) and motor response (movement you’ll be performing) are specific to your sport to increase ecological validity.
Examples
Here, we’re using the SwitchedOn app as an easy and accessible way to get cognitively challenging randomized stimuli by yourself (download it for free on iOS or Android). As you’ll see, it also gives us various stimuli options and settings to potentially make a training environment more complex than the sport to make the game situations feel slower. If you press “Tap to try” while on your mobile device, you’ll get taken directly to the drill in the app.
Selective Attention
The ability to focus on task-relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information.
Attention Switching
The ability to unconsciously shift focus between one task and another.
Impulse Control
The ability to resist impulses, delay gratification, and inhibit responses.
Cognitive Flexibility
The ability to adapt to unpredictable or new concepts or events.
Working Memory
The ability to think, compare, and make a decision.
Key Takeaways
Agility training must incorporate a reactive component.
Most agility training only involves reacting to simple cues, but adding more complex cues that target higher-level cognitive functions may improve the physical and cognitive components of agility in a way that better transfers to the sport.
The SwitchedOn app provides a simple and effective way to increase the cognitive challenge of your agility training using just your mobile device.
To learn more, check out our FREE Scientific White Paper on The Neuroscience of Athletic Performance and the Incorporation of Cognitive Demands into Agility
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