Speed vs. Agility

The most common question I get from young athletes is, "How do I get faster?". While many assume a faster athlete is always a better athlete, a lot of people fail to recognize the difference between great speed and the often more important prevalence of agility. Outside of track athletes and long distance runners, speed itself is not going to be enough to win games, matches or plays. This is because speed is simply a linear concept: how fast one can start from point A and get to point B. Agility on the other hand, defines one's ability to start, stop, accelerate, decelerate and change directions. As you can recall, most field sports like football, soccer, rugby and baseball, along with most court sports like basketball, tennis and even volleyball, RARELY require an athlete to run for long, uninterrupted periods. All of these sports require much more agility and explosive power to be competitive.

This is not to say speed does not have it's place in sports. A break away touchdown run and a dazzling fast break can often change the outcome of a game. The truth is, that chance rarely comes without some nifty shifting and evading first. This is why it is important for most athletes to focus their sports training on agility first and overall speed as a secondary goal. You might be the fastest person in the world, but if you don't have the strength and athletic ability to quickly slow down and rapidly start back up in another direction, you are not going to be successful in most competitive sports. Agility training is ESSENTIAL for being a "faster" athlete, but not necessarily a faster person. Stay tuned to find out how to improve your sport specific speed and how to supplement your training program to improve linear speed as well.