Intro to agility ladder: 1 in

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Intro to Agility Ladder is a beginner-friendly program that provides an introduction to the foundational skills of agility and quickness. This program offers exercises and drills designed to help develop leg strength, balance, coordination, and speed, using an agility ladder that is one inch wide. No special equipment is required and the program can be done solo or with a partner. With this program, you can improve your ability to react quickly, enhance agility and footwork, and increase overall athletic performance.

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Transcript

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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness,
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and we're talking about agility training
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using one of my favorite agility tools, the agility ladder. This is one of my
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favorite tools because we get to not only use this with our elite level
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athletes, but also our beginners. We can use this with the general consumer, we
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can use this with somebody just getting involved in fitness, and they tend to
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have a great time with it. Now, when we start talking about performance, we use
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the agility ladder not for breakneck speeds. If I want something that I'm
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going to practice agility and breakneck speeds, I'm going to use something a little
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bit more open, like a cone drill, or a shuttle run, where somebody can take the
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stride length that is most efficient for them. This is all about optimizing
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mechanics, we can think about it as a proprioceptively enriched agility
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drill, and I want to make sure that my athletes are as efficient as possible
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through the various footwork drills that we do. I'm going to have my friend Mike
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come out here and show you kind of the beginning of ladder drills. So maybe step
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here Mike. The first thing I want to make sure Mike is doing on his ladder drills
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is making sure that his arms and legs are moving the way they're supposed to.
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One of the biggest mistakes I see in the latter is people just kind of drop their
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hands to their side and try to get through the ladder as fast as they
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possibly can. We need to make sure we keep that optimal gait mechanic. So Mike what
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I'm going to have you do is you're going to step forward, and come forward
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with the opposite arm. Good, and again. Good.
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Go ahead and go all the way through the ladder like that. You have somebody go
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all the way through the ladder like that a couple times, usually this starts
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to feel pretty natural for them. So I have Mike maybe go through this one or
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two times just thinking, forward leg, forward arm. Now that Mike seems to have
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this mechanic down pat, I'm going to have Mike start concentrating on our first
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performance queue, which is pushing. Great athletes push, they don't pull, they don't
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reach. So now Mike, rather than reaching forward with that arm, that's
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not what I want you to focus on. This leg I want you to think about pushing
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through the floor, and driving that elbow back. Alright, so you can start in that
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same position, but push, good, push, push, push, good. I'll have Mike go through a
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couple times with this mechanic, just working on that queue of each step as a
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push, rather than a reach.
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Now, the next drills I'm going to do with Mike involve how the foot should land.
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So I want to make sure that he stays on his fore foot, or that area
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just behind his toes, and then every step rolls forward so he's getting efficient
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forward motion with every step. None of the kind of stopping. In fact, I can you
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show us what the bad way of doing this where you see people kind of lean
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forward and kind of crushing the foot in the ground. Yeah! You see people where
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they kind of drive there their fore foot into the ground. You want to make
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sure it's a roll mechanic that Mike feels like he could take off, and go
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faster with every step. Let's work on that roll mechanic. Good, good, pushing
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forward, rolling forward with every step.
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Now, one sign we can use for maximum efficiency, is if Mike is
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efficiently eccentrically decelerating force, isometrically stabilizing, and then
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concentrically accelerating his force, there should be almost no noise. Now,
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this floor is pretty loud, it's a hardwood floor and he's got a hard
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rubber sole on his shoes, but I'm going to have Mike try to get as quiet as he
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possibly can, plus all of the other queues we talked about before. Nice, Mike,
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let's try that one more time.
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And for our last queue, Mike has had to look down because he's had to get used to
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where his foot placement should be, where that ladder is. Now I'm going to have Mike work
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on a little bit more upright posture, all the same queues we've been talking about
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before. Good, let's try that one more time Mike.
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So there you have it, that's our first ladder
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drill which is called a one in, putting one foot in each box. You can see that
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there're a lot of little mechanical things that we need to break down, and I
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think Mike did about 10 reps through the ladder, do you feel a little tired there Mike? -I do.
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Okay, so that might equal one set through, and we can work that into our resistance
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training program, we can work that in after a warm up, and maybe do 6 to 10
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times through the ladder, two to three times. Thank you for watching the