ABSTRACT
The ability to move effectively to facilitate the successful completion of sports-related tasks is a fundamental component of most sports. Consequently, the development of movement capacity should clearly play an important role in any athletic development programme. Traditionally, this has been closely linked to the concept of agility, with agility being considered as a fundamental cornerstone of athletic performance. However, of all the physical components of fitness, it is perhaps agility that provides the greatest challenge to the strength and conditioning coach, relying on a number of contributory factors that span multiple domains. Agility will always have a degree of context specificity, yet a reductionist approach typically loses this context, often resulting in exercises or tests that bear little resemblance to the tasks athletes must perform in their sport. This chapter looks at agility from a reverse engineering perspective: outlining the tasks athletes have to perform in sport, identifying the constraints to their performance, identifying the functions of the movements they deploy and the key movement capacities athletes need to develop to carry out the tasks. This analysis results in a movement syllabus that encompasses the movement patterns of the vast majority of sports, but critically reflects the way in which they are used in sport. This syllabus subsequently guides the development programme, where movements are sequenced according to the principles of skill development, but guided by the reverse engineering process, ensuring effective transfer from training to performance.
