What Agility Actually Is (And Why Most Agility Training Misses the Point)
Agility Isn’t What Most People Think It Is
A recent article on NPR examined exercises to improve speed and strength. These exercises were ultimately chosen (per the article’s headline) to improve agility.
The only trouble is the article never defined what, exactly, agility is. The article assumed you, the reader, knows exactly what agility is, but agility is one of those words that is often conflated with quickness, coordination, or reaction time.
And, to some extent, it is all of those things, but it’s also none of them specifically.
People commonly think of agility as an aspect of athleticism. It’s commonly described as speed + coordination, the ability to change direction fast. Athletes have it. Regular people, maybe not so much. It’s a physical asset that decreases with age.
The Actual Definition of Agility
The literal definition of agility paints a slightly different picture. The word agility originated some time in the 1500s. It has Latin origins, stemming from the words agere (“to set in motion”) agilis (“nimble, quick”) and agilitatem (“mobility, nimbleness, quickness”).
According to Merriam-Webster, to be agile means to be ready to move quickly, with easy grace. The sport science research defines agility as a whole-body movement that is done rapidly and involves a change of direction or velocity in response to some sort of stimulus.
Based on all of this, it’s safe to say that agile means to have a reason to suddenly move quickly, possibly in a non-linear way.
The Sumo wrestler is agile. There are moments during a match where the Sumo wrestler, in an attempt to knock his opponent out of bounds, responds quickly to the opponent’s body position.
The salsa dancer is agile. She responds to her partner, twirling, and shifting, and shimmying in rhythm with both her partner and the music.
The person who rights themselves after catching their foot on a curb is agile. The change in speed is a response; the ability to remain upright is an act of quickness and change in direction.
The Three Sensory Systems That Drive Agility
In order to be agile, a person must be able to tap into three key components:
Proprioception (the unconscious awareness of where the body is in space)
Visual input (using your vision to scan the environment)
The vestibular system, which is the sensory network in your inner ear that detects how your head moves, coordinating posture and balance.
The speed with which you are able to change direction or suddenly increase velocity is based on these three things. Which brings me back to the NPR article.
Why Explosive Power Isn’t the Same as Agility
The title of the article opens with a question: Do you want to improve your agility? The opening paragraph of the article asks if you have heard of training for “explosive power.”
The trouble with this is explosive power and agility are not the same thing. Explosive power is the ability to generate power in an extremely short amount of time; power is the measurement that tells you how fast work is getting done. Work is what happens when you use force to move something over a distance.
Another way to think of this: if an electric scooter were to race a Ferrari from one end of the street to the other, the Ferrari would get there first. This is because the Ferrari has more power than the electric scooter.
Since work depends on force, and force depends on an object’s mass and gravity’s pull on that mass — which requires more work to move: the electric scooter or the Ferrari? Unless the electric scooter is hauling a very heavy load, the Ferrari has more mass. This means it requires more work to move the Ferrari than it does to move the electric scooter.
Can explosive power contribute to agility? Sure, just like general strength contributes to agility. In fact, a 2023 systematic review tried to pinpoint exactly which interventions (strength, sprint training, plyometrics) improved pro-agility performance. The studies they included had small sample sizes and largely consisted of novice athletes, with a handful of elite and sub-elite athletes thrown in.
The results were…moderate, at best. Resistance training, plyometrics training, and sprinting did something, but how much of something and would that something have occurred if they simply went out and played their sports? It’s impossible to know.
What Actually Improves Agility: Two Clients
I have two clients, Ben and Amos.* Ben is 61. He has been seeing me once a week for almost 5 years.
Ben is a daily walker. He walks 2 miles, 365 days a year, rain or shine.
When he started, every autumn, when the leaves fell, he would go for his walk, step on a wet leaf, and fall. This was a consistent pattern, one that he was acutely aware of.
Something happened after 4 months of working together: autumn came and went, and he didn’t fall. He commented on it, wondering if it was a fluke.
But then the second autumn came, and the third, and the fourth, and he still didn’t fall. In fact, he hasn’t fallen since he started working with me.
Let’s be clear: it takes a while to gain strength, generally around 3 months for physiological strength changes to occur — neuromuscular adaptations occur much faster, and the nervous system learns quickly.
I incorporate resistance training into my sessions, but I also incorporate different movement patterns and general body awareness exercises. If we think of agility as the ability to change direction quickly, catching yourself when you slip on a wet leaf would be the result of agility.
Strength isn’t what helped Ben that first year. General movement and body awareness was.
Amos is 80. He began seeing me a year ago, at the behest of his wife who was concerned about his balance. Amos is also a daily walker; he walks miles every day.
Within our first month of working together, Amos fell while he was out on one of his walks. He was frustrated, and worried that he was going to have to curtail his walking, but he continued seeing me 3 times a week, for our 27 minute sessions.
A few weeks after that initial fall, his wife told me Amos was walking better. He wasn’t shuffling unless he was tired. He was looking ahead instead of down at his feet. His arms were swinging.
Amos hasn’t fallen since last summer. He feels strong, and is walking well. I do a lot of different movement patterns with Amos, including things that involve changing direction and using his eyes to assess his environment.
One other thing worth noting about Amos—he has Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s can affect gait and balance, and can have a pretty profound impact on overall movement patterns. It makes his improvements extremely gratifying. We are capable of learning and gaining strength, flexibility, and body awareness, even when there are distinct neurological changes taking place.
Agility Exercises: How to Train the Sensory Systems That Matter
If you want to work on agility in the gym, exercises that involve coordinating multiple limbs at once and some sort of speed or directional change will be your best bet. Since the goal is some level of transfer, these types of exercises shouldn’t involve heavy weight and should be done with either a really light load or body weight.
Your strength work makes you feel stronger and more stable — and that informs your agility. While agility doesn’t replace strength and isn’t necessarily a byproduct of strength, when you feel more strong and stable, you feel more confident overall in your movements, which opens up options.
Each of the exercises below targets the sensory inputs that drive agility — body awareness, vision, and balance. They are all variations of exercises I have used with Ben and Amos. They can be scaled up or down depending on level, and can be performed once a week as a standalone mini routine or as part of a structured exercise program.
Exercise 1: Sit-to-Stand and Walk
Agility is a change in speed or direction in response to a stimulus — which means you don’t need complicated equipment or a ladder on the floor to train it. All you need is a box and some space. This exercise is one I use across a wide range of clients and abilities, and it scales easily depending on what someone’s working with.
Exercise 2: Imaginary Ball Drill
This one only requires you and a little imagination. It’s a drill I use with clients across a wide range of ages and abilities — and because there’s no equipment involved, it’s easy to scale on the spot. The goal is speed and directional change, which are the two things that actually make something an agility exercise.
If you participate regularly in sports or athletics, one of the best ways to develop your agility is to practice your sport. Doing things like drilling rebounds while paying attention to one aspect of how you change direction, or returning serves while emphasizing where you are looking, translate directly to agility improvements.
Ben didn’t stop falling because he got stronger. He stopped falling because his body got better at responding. That’s what these exercises are asking for — not more power, but more trust in the feedback you are getting internally, from your joints and muscles, and externally, from your environment. It turns out that’s trainable at any age, with almost no equipment. In fact, if anything, it requires exploring exercise in a more playful way.
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*Names have been changed.
References:
Jinha, A., & Herzog, W. (2025). Muscle power: A simple concept causing much confusion. Journal of sport and health science, 14, 101005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2024.101005
Xu, Z., Su, S., & Xu, Z. (2026). Effects of variable resistance training on lower limb explosive power in athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PeerJ, 14, e20644. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.20644
Forster, J. W. D., Uthoff, A. M., Rumpf, M. C., & Cronin, J. B. (2023). Training to Improve Pro-Agility Performance: A Systematic Review. Journal of human kinetics, 85, 35–51. https://doi.org/10.2478/hukin-2022-0108
Yan, S., Yun, X., Liu, Q., Hong, Z., Chen, Y., & Zhang, S. (2025). Advances in gait research related to Alzheimer's disease. Frontiers in neurology, 16, 1548283. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2025.1548283