Name: Chapter 19 - Speed, Agility, and Quickness Training Concepts | NASM CPT
Uploaded: 2025-06-25T00:26:16.000Z
Duration: 26 min 40 s
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to Chapter 19, which is our Speed, Agility, and Quickness training concepts chapter.

This is more or less the progression from the plyometrics base to now working with this a more explosive base, a more start-stop base, a more change of direction base, and it's just a natural progression for us to take us from plyometrics into this SAQ, which is what NASM usually goes through and talks about.

So let's go ahead and it's a shorter chapter compared to some of the other ones that we initially talked with earlier on with like exercise science and everything like that.

So with our SAQ training, obviously we're looking for ways that we can get the muscles, the neurological or nervous system, our ligaments, tendons, and other soft tissues like cartilage, and our cardiovascular system to kind of communicate really well together, stimulate it to a point that it's going to become very effective, and really create those adaptations that for those areas, the muscular and neurological connective tissue and cardiovascular, to be able to enhance an athlete, to enhance a senior, to enhance a general population person.

So it just, it trickles into everybody as long as we use it effectively.

So there's your definitions below there, speed, agility, and quickness, speed, the ability to move the body in one intended direction as fast as possible, agility, ability to start or accelerate, and then stop, decelerate, and or stabilize, and then change directions to a signal, a stimulus, something that will make you basically have to adjust.

And then also at that same time, you're trying to maintain postural alignment or postural control and then quickness, react and change body positions with maximal rate of force production.

So basically, you know, that rate, maximal rate of force production, we could even chalk that up to with max power, all right, in all planes of motion, from all body positions.

So that could even be getting up off the floor and then starting your run.

That's just a simplistic way of doing it.

I mean, if you look at the senior population, can they get up off the floor fairly quick if it were an emergency situation?

That's where we could work with quickness with them is trying to make them understand that.

So speed, agility, and quickness, those are your definitions.

Definitely something that will be test related.

So again, one direction as fast as possible.

With speed, all right, if you notice here, this person obviously is running.

So with running, there's two different ways that we can work around running, and one of those is stride rate, the amount of times that the foot makes contact with the ground.

So the higher the stride rate, the higher the speed technically, and the stride frequency.

So those two are, you know, stride rate, the amount of time, stride frequency, how often it happens and how often it occurs.

So if you have a longer stride, your frequency will be down, all right, because you're not going to touch as much, you know.

So that's just kind of how we can put those into perspective so that we can be able to adjust our people, all right.

Now, everybody has a different body segment.

Everybody has different femur, different lower leg, so tib-fib lengths, everybody has different torso lengths.

So a lot of these will be dependent upon, you know, basically that person.

So if I'm 5'10 and you're 6'3", you know, the stride rate is going to be less, even though you may touch the same, because my rate is going to be farther, all right.

My stride frequency may be the same, but see how we can always implement and change that.

So it just depends on the person and what they're physiologically made up of, anatomically, excuse me, anatomically made up of, all right.

So when we talk about speed, we want to talk about proper mechanics.

So we have frontside and backside mechanics.

With frontside mechanics, we're talking about what we call triple flexion, which is hip, knee, and ankle flexion.

Now ankle flexion is what we would consider dorsiflexion, okay.

Backside mechanics is triple extension, which is hip, knee, and ankle extension, but with ankles, that would be ankle plantar flexion, all right.

So with triple flexion, with frontside mechanics, what we're looking to improve there is our ability to decelerate by, you know, increasing our braking force.

But at the same time, we also can use that really aggressive flexion to be able to use as a driving force for propulsion, okay.

Whereas backside mechanics, definitely more about that push phase off the ground, so ground reactive force, all right.

And so at that point there, we are working more, you know, at that same time with that backside mechanics of the foot and upper body, where we have that arm drive to help us, again, to be able to get massive explosion so that we can then propel ourselves in the direction that's intended, okay.

So with these checkpoints during running, we want to obviously look really carefully at the foot and ankle complex, we want to look at really closely the knee complex.

Surprisingly enough, you may see, and it says it right there on the top, if we look right down here at the knee valgus location, all right, you know, you might get people that if you pay attention closely and stand behind them while they're running, you can see that bow in or that knock knee of that complex.

Now there are a lot of other aspects that we talked about previously in terms of checkpoints, you know, collapsing arches that can create that valgus, so that would be where the foot and ankle complex come in.

So if we have even just a slight amount of foot external rotation, that can change the way that our foot makes contact with the ground, therefore creating more stress, therefore creating a potential for injury.

So we have to make sure we're watching both front and backside mechanics for that, you know, that's our checkpoint base.

And then where are we in terms of our LPHC, our lumbopelvic hip complex?

You know, like it says here, do we have an upright torso or are we leaning forward?

When you're accelerating, the body wants to be angled down, not aggressively like you're doing a good morning, but you want to be leaned forward.

We want that center of gravity in front of the base of support.

So therefore, what would end up happening is while you're running, right, your belly button would be in front of your hips, so what we're doing is we're trying to catch ourselves over that base of support, but what that's doing is speeding us up.

Think about when you are going downstairs, right, when you go downstairs, you're more upright and you're trying to maintain consistent steps down.

The minute that your belly button goes in front of your hips, you start speeding up and you almost want to trip going down the stairs.

It's the same thing for sprinting, right?

But we're doing it on purpose until we get to a certain point of our run that we feel like we need to start getting ourselves to stand upright.

And then at that point, during max velocity, we want to make sure that we're pretty much straight up and down, all right?

There shouldn't be any rounding of the back.

There shouldn't be any undue lean forward, all right?

Now like they say here in this comments, unless you're reaching for an object like a baton or trying to reach your body in front of itself to be able to cross the finish line, whatever that may be, all right, but normally it's a lean into that acceleration and then as you start getting up to closer to max velocity, you'll start seeing yourself lift up more.

Now the head, obviously we want the head to be in line with our hips and our pelvis and our lumbar spine.

So like a neutral, we want to consider that neutral spine, all right?

So there shouldn't be any unjust or unknowing compensations that are there, all right?

We don't really want to have the head kicked back.

We don't want to have the head kicked forward, okay?

Now again, unless you're doing it for a purpose like it says here, like if you're trying to track a ball or another object, all right, that might be another reason for that, okay?

The other thing too, like it says on the very, very bottom, by tracking it says, as this can affect the position of the lumbopelvic hip complex known as the pelvoocular reflex, ocular meaning vision, so therefore we're talking about how we can keep ourselves focused while keeping alignment, while also maintaining focus on everything.

So agility and quickness, all right, agility, high levels of coordination, being able to try to reset the body back over the center of gravity because we know that at times we're going to be in front of the center of gravity.

We're going to be on the side of the, outside of the base of support, okay, meaning outside of those legs.

And that's how we can change directions while also maintaining increasing or decreasing speed depending upon what we're doing.

We need to be able to think about increasing the ability to decelerate better.

We need to be able to understand that we can also help with what we call dynamic flexibility.

So with movement, we have better postural control, we have better core strength, and we have better proprioception, or basically understanding where you are in relationship to space, okay?

So by having better agility, you know, increased effective agility, we can actually think about reducing injury risks because we're using all planes of motion, sagittal, frontal, transverse planes of motion, and we're creating more force production at those soft tissue areas or connective tissues, so therefore we're enhancing those areas as well, making us a more well-rounded person, hence the reason why agility is important for somebody like an elderly person because it can help with fall prevention.

Obviously we modify that to an extent to make sure that they're getting exactly what they need, okay?

Then quickness, so here, quickness, just being able to react to visual cues, auditory cues, kinesthetic stimuli, so that's some sort of touch, okay, that you will be able to then react as quickly as possible and as fast as possible so that you can make the necessary changes or responses that are needed.

So for the non-athletic population, we've kind of talked about both of these, but again, softball, golf, tennis, hiking, running, skiing, water sports, anybody ever try getting on water skis or the boards, the water boards, not even on a boat, not even being pulled by a boat, but then think about paddle boarding, think about surfing, all of those require all of what we've been working on so far.

We need to think about coordination, power, reaction time, agility, all right?

All of those things matter when we're trying to do those recreational activities, so if we want to get better at something, we have to be able to increase our general functioning patterns, so whether it be flexibility, whether it be balance and coordination, speed, agility, and quickness here, all of those are necessary, okay?

But we have to get people to understand how to accelerate, how to decelerate, and how to change directions, so that's when we talk about the modifications.

If you're going to plan specific workouts, we need to make sure we have that modification for the newer person, so that they can experience those transition points, and then be able to eventually pick up that speed, agility, and quickness at a better rate, okay?

If we know where they're at with assessment, we can get a good profile on them, whether it be an injury profile, general health profile, and then obviously assessments that we can do for the dynamic portion of everything to see where they are in terms of their initial baseline of health, wellness, fitness, and exercise, okay?

But they need to make sure they, you know, before, just like plyometrics, they need to come in with a good level of flexibility, they have to be able to repeat, so muscular endurance, they need to be endured cardiovascular endurance, and then they have to have some strength to them before we can really ramp up what we want to do with them, okay?

But just like anything else, slow and simple, and progress that eventually down the line to fast and complex.

That will only help them to build into the program that you're trying to give them.

So starting off slow and simple, you know, that basically goes into that whole continuum that we talk about, known to unknown, right?

Make sure they know the movements to things that they're eventually not going to know, but they understand how to move their body correctly, all right?

So with youth, all right, basic movement will make it so that they can do increases in rate and magnitude, okay?

But again, they need to be developing these good movement patterns before we can really see how to progress them in terms of speed, agility, and quickness.

Even something, I mean, if we look at just simple physical education classes, you know, those individuals who have a hard time just doing simple locomotor skills like, you know, running or walking or jogging, and then moving them into galloping and, you know, and skipping, if they can't decipher how to, you know, move their body in those ways, it's going to be very hard for us to progress them in a speed, agility, quickness routine because of the fact that their body just doesn't move well in very simplistic movement patterns, and adults the same way, all right?

But what we want to make sure of is that we want to make sure we have an environment that's meant to be challenging for kids, all right?

So they have to be able to adapt, and then at that point, they have to be able to apply, you know, appropriate movement patterns to those measures on the, of an external force or an external stimulus, okay?

So we have to be able to understand that they have the basics down, okay, well now let's progress them.

Let's make things a little bit more challenging on them, but again, progressing them in the proper way will only allow them to improve at a better rate.