Do agility ladders make you faster?

There is little evidence that they do. In a randomized trial of youth soccer players, three ladder sessions a week for six weeks produced no gains in sprint, agility or dribbling tests beyond what the control group got from regular training. Ladders can work as a short coordination warm-up, but your speed comes from sprinting, cutting and reacting at full effort.

What is the difference between agility and change of direction speed?

Change of direction speed is how fast you complete a planned route, like the 5-10-5 or the T-test, where you know every turn in advance. Agility, as Sheppard and Young defined it in 2006, is a rapid whole-body change of speed or direction in response to a stimulus, such as an opponent's move. Studies have found the two are largely independent skills.

What are the best agility drills for football, soccer and basketball?

Use a mix: short acceleration sprints, cone drills such as the 5-10-5 and T-test for planned cuts, sprint-to-stop drills for braking, and mirror drills, partner cuts and small-sided games for reacting to an opponent.

How often should you do speed and agility training?

Two sessions a week in the off-season, on non-consecutive days, done fresh at the start of practice or before lifting. In season, practice and games supply a lot of cutting, so one short session a week is usually enough. In one study, one or two 15-minute small-sided game sessions a week over seven weeks improved reactive agility in elite junior Australian football players.

Can reaction time be trained?

The decision part of agility can. In a study of rugby league players, three weeks of reactive agility training cut reactive agility test times from 1.92 to 1.66 seconds with no change in planned change of direction times. In Australian football players, small-sided games improved reactive agility through faster decisions, while movement time changed only trivially.

Speed and agility training: the drills that carry over to games

By the Sprint University coaching team

Agility in a game has two parts: how fast you can stop and change direction, and how fast you read what is in front of you and pick the right move. Cone drills train the first part. Reactive drills, partner drills and small-sided games train the second. Agility ladders train neither very well. In a randomized trial, six weeks of ladder work added nothing over regular soccer training.

Train straight-line acceleration first, add deceleration and cutting drills to the same sessions, and finish with something you have to react to. Plan two short sessions a week in the off-season and one in season.

Change of direction speed vs agility

Coaches use "agility" for anything that involves turning, so in 2006 Sheppard and Young proposed a tighter definition: a rapid whole-body movement with a change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus. The stimulus is what makes it agility. A defender reacting to a ball carrier is agility. Running a 5-10-5 you have memorised is change of direction speed (CODS), a physical skill with no decision in it.

Later research backs the split. Sheppard's group built a reactive agility test in which 38 Australian football players responded to a live tester's movements. Higher-level players beat lower-level players on that test, but the two groups were no different over a 10 m sprint or a planned change of direction test. A 2015 review by Young, Dawson and Henry concluded that agility and CODS are independent skills, that agility tests separate better athletes from weaker ones better than CODS tests do, and that strength training has improved CODS in studies while no study has shown it improves agility. A 2018 study of 76 trained athletes reached the same conclusion even when the planned and reactive tests used the same movement pattern.

Straight speed and cutting speed are separate too

In a 2001 study, 36 men trained twice a week for six weeks with either straight 20–40 m sprints or sprints with three to five 100° cuts. The straight-sprint group got faster in a straight line but gained little on the agility tests, and the more complex the test, the less it transferred. The cutting group improved on the change of direction tests with no significant change in straight sprint times.

Simple tests sit in between. A 2022 review of 20 studies on the pro agility shuttle found sprint training had the largest improvement per session, ahead of plyometrics and resistance training. A 5-10-5 is mostly accelerating and braking, which may be why straight sprint work carries over to it. A team-sport athlete needs all three trained: straight acceleration, planned cutting and reacting.

What agility ladder drills train

Agility ladder drills (also sold as speed ladder drills) are quick, low-force steps in a set pattern: two feet in each square, in-and-outs, lateral shuffles, crossovers. You know every step before you start, you never sprint, and you never have to stop your body mass hard. By the definitions above, that leaves out most of what agility is.

The research on ladders is thin, and the best trial is not kind to them. In a 2020 randomized controlled trial, 18 under-13 soccer players either added three agility ladder sessions a week for six weeks or kept to normal team training. Both groups got faster over 10 m and 20 m. The ladder group improved no more than the control group on any test, including sprints, a slalom agility test and dribbling. The authors concluded that ladder training did not look like a time-efficient way to improve fitness or dribbling.

Ladders are fine for two or three minutes in a warm-up, to get your feet moving and practise staying on the balls of your feet. Don't count that time as speed or agility training, and don't judge an athlete by how fast their feet move in a ladder.

Cone drills for change of direction

Cone drills train CODS: accelerating, braking and pushing off in a new direction on a known route. Run every rep at full effort with enough rest to repeat that effort, usually a slow walk back plus 30–60 seconds. Once reps get slower or sloppier, stop. The pro agility shuttle and 3-cone drill pages show typical times if you want to test yourself.

5-10-5 (pro agility shuttle)

4–6 reps, full walk-back rest

Three cones in a line, 5 yards apart. Start straddling the middle cone, sprint 5 yards to one side and touch the line, turn and sprint 10 yards to the far line, touch it, then sprint 5 back through the middle. Alternate the side you go to first. It trains two 180° turns, so most of the work is braking and pushing back out.

T-test

3–4 reps

Four cones in a T: one at the start, one 10 yards straight ahead, and one 5 yards to each side of that far cone. Sprint forward, shuffle left, shuffle right across the top, shuffle back to the middle and backpedal to the start. It mixes forward, lateral and backward movement, which suits basketball and defensive backs.

3-cone drill (L-drill)

3–4 reps

Three cones in an L, 5 yards apart. Start at the first cone, sprint to the corner cone and back, then sprint around the corner cone, loop around the far cone and come back around the corner cone to the finish. It rewards tight turns around a cone, the way a receiver or linebacker bends a route.

45° and 90° cuts

3–4 reps each way

Sprint 10 yards to a cone, plant and cut at 45° or 90°, then sprint 5 yards out. Shallow cuts are taken at higher speed, so practise them as well as the sharp turns in the tests.

Deceleration drills

Every cut starts with a stop, and team-sport players stop hard more often than they start hard. A 2019 meta-analysis of GPS data from 19 studies and 469 elite male players across seven team sports found more high-intensity decelerations than accelerations in every sport except American football. Soccer showed the biggest gap. Train braking on purpose, and start with these drills before you add sharp cuts.

Sprint to stick

2 sets of 3

Sprint 10 yards and stop inside a 2-yard box marked with cones. Hold the stop for two seconds in an athletic position: hips back, chest over your knees, feet wider than your hips. Build to 15 and 20 yards as you get the stop under control.

Sprint, stop, go

2 sets of 3

Sprint 10 yards, stop in the box, then sprint back the way you came or out to one side on a call. It links the braking to the next push, which is what a cut is.

Drop step and run

3 reps each side

Backpedal 3–5 yards, open your hips with a drop step on a call, and sprint 10 yards in the new direction. Defensive backs and outfielders turn and run like this all game.

Watch the last two or three steps of the stop. They should get shorter, with your hips sinking and your feet getting wider. If an athlete stops on one stiff leg or their knee caves in, shorten the sprint and slow the approach until the position is right.

The Sprint University app

Acceleration work every week, set from your times

Sprint University programs acceleration, top speed, speed endurance, plyos and strength week by week from your current times. Each morning it reads HRV, resting heart rate and sleep from Apple Health, and the coach chat rewrites your week when something changes.

Get Sprint University

Reactive agility and reaction time drills

Reactive drills add the stimulus that cone drills leave out, and they train the quality that separated higher-level players in the agility research.

Two studies show the decision part can be trained. In 15 rugby league players, three weeks of reactive agility training cut reactive agility test times from 1.92 to 1.66 seconds, while a group that did not do the training barely changed (1.89 to 1.87). Planned change of direction times did not move in either group, so the gain came from perceiving and deciding faster. In 25 elite under-18 Australian football players, one or two 15-minute sessions a week of small-sided games over seven weeks (11 sessions in all) improved reactive agility, and all of that gain came from faster decisions. The group doing change-of-direction drills saw only small to trivial changes in either test.

Mirror drill

4–6 reps of 5–8 s

Two athletes face each other between two cones about 5 yards apart. The leader shuffles, stops and changes direction as they like; the follower tries to stay square to them. Switch roles each rep. Keep reps short so the follower stays fast.

Partner cut

6–8 reps

Sprint at a partner standing 5–10 yards away. As you approach, they step or point left or right, and you cut that way and sprint 5 yards past a cone. The decision comes from reading a person, as it does in a game.

Coach's call

6–8 reps

Start in a stance or a backpedal. The coach calls or points a direction, and you sprint to the cone on that side. Vary the timing of the call so you can't guess it. This is a reaction time drill: it trains you to start on a signal, but a point or a shout is simpler to read than a player's body.

Small-sided games

2–4 rounds of 2–4 min

Two-on-two or three-on-three on a small field or half court, with a simple scoring rule such as tagging or a ball carried over a line. Every cut is a reaction to an opponent and a teammate, so it trains the whole skill at once.

Light boards and reaction apps are popular, but reacting to a light is closer to the coach's call than to reading an opponent. A partner who can fake you out teaches more.

Fitting agility into a speed week

Pair agility work with acceleration work on the same day. Both are short, fast and done fresh, and both need full rest between reps. Put them at the start of practice or before you lift, never after conditioning. Keep top-speed sprinting on its own day so each quality gets your best effort.

Day	Off-season focus
Day 1	Acceleration, deceleration and cone drills, then lower-body strength
Day 2	Easy day: mobility, light tempo or skill work
Day 3	Top-speed sprints and plyos, then upper-body strength
Day 4	Easy day
Day 5	Acceleration, reactive drills and a small-sided game, then strength

In season, practice and games already include a lot of cutting. One short session a week of acceleration, a few deceleration reps and a reactive drill keeps the qualities sharp without adding much fatigue. The guides for football, soccer, basketball and baseball and softball show full weeks for each sport.

A sample speed and agility session

About 45 minutes for a team-sport athlete in the off-season. Start with a full sprint warm-up. The acceleration drills guide has more start positions, and plyometrics for sprinters covers the jumps you can add on the top-speed day.

Block	Prescription
Warm-up	10–15 min, finishing with 2–3 min of ladder or quick-feet drills if you like them
Acceleration	5 × 10 yd from a sport stance (3-point, split or athletic), walk back
Deceleration	Sprint to stick, 2 × 3 at 10–15 yd
Change of direction	5-10-5 × 4 (alternate the first turn), then 45° cuts × 3 each way
Reactive	Mirror drill 4 × 6 s each role, then partner cut × 6
Small-sided game	3 rounds of 3 min, 2v2 or 3v3, 2 min rest

Time your 5-10-5 and your 10-yard starts once a month. If your 40-yard dash or your acceleration times stall, add straight sprint work before you add more cone drills.

Common mistakes

Calling the ladder agility training: Ladders have no reaction, no sprinting and no hard braking. Keep them to a few minutes of the warm-up and spend the session on cutting and reactive drills.
Only running planned drills: Cone drills build change of direction speed, but the reactive part is what separated better players in the studies. Finish most sessions with a partner drill or a small-sided game.
Agility work at the end of practice: Tired cuts are slow cuts, and they are not the reps you want to rehearse. Do speed and agility work first, while you are fresh.
Too little rest: With 10 seconds between reps a 5-10-5 becomes conditioning. Walk back and take 30–60 seconds so every rep is at full effort.
Skipping deceleration: Players brake hard more often than they accelerate hard in most team sports. Teach the stop before you load it with sharp cuts.
Ignoring straight-line speed: Most of a 5-10-5 is accelerating and stopping. If your 10-yard time is slow, your shuttle will be too.