Football teams rely on players abilities to evade opponents, both with and without the ball. Being agile on your foot is key to getting ahead of your marker, beating your man to make the cross, or even defending shots efficiently … to name only a few! Here are three tips to improving your agility!
Get Stronger
I know – this is becoming a familiar theme in our posts! Being able to decelerate and re accelerate on each of your legs takes a lot of horse-power (If your prepared to disagree, get ready for Bambi on ice comparisons). When in the gym make sure to stick to the big compound lower body movements to increase your lower body strength. If your someone that struggles to consistently up your weights in the gym check out our Creapure creatine, the most researched supplement shown to increase strength levels!
Get Leaner
Now, we imagine for many people that this one goes without saying, but some might need reminding! If your carrying round a jelly belly from Christmas, your ability to change direction quickly will be extremely limited (see any physics lesson). That said, this also goes for the ‘big’ lads in the team, if you’ve got an upper body like Arnie and a lower body like your average Giraffe, your power to weight ratio is going to be severely against you! If agility is the name of the game, stay lean and make sure your gym work is functional.
Practice
There are two main types of agility drills that you need to be incorporating into your training – unreactive and reactive. Un reactive being the type that you set out the cones and hurdles and subsequently run through as quickly as possible. Important. However, potentially more important is the reactive drills, using a partner (or similar) make sure your drill requires some reaction-based work to sharpen up your abilities! Staying sharp from minute 1 in games is crucial, get your pre match prep on point with Focus90®.
