How to Improve Your Agility

Agility is as important, and often more important, than muscle strength for dance routines and for sports such as martial arts, soccer and basketball. If you want to excel at dance or sports, agility training should be a part of your daily fitness program. You can improve agility using a variety of exercises. If you are on a small budget, you may be pleased to know that most of these exercises don't require any expensive equipment.

Things You'll Need

• Comfortable athletic shoes
• Obstacles for obstacle course (can be items found around the house)

Instructions

1. Practice balance. Balance is one of the most important parts of agility. You can improve your balance using a simple exercise martial artists use: From a standing position, bend and lift your knee until your thigh is parallel to the floor. Hold that position as long as you can and then switch legs. You can practice this with the extended knee bent or the entire leg held straight out, parallel to the floor. You will notice that your muscles tremble when doing this balancing exercise--this exercise will strengthen your legs along with helping you develop a strong center of gravity.

2. Play ping pong, tennis, badminton, soccer, handball or racquetball. These games can help you develop better coordination, which will improve your agility. Handball and racquetball are the fastest-paced of the games mentioned.

3. Run an obstacle course as often as possible. You can create an obstacle course in your own backyard using household items such as rope, old tires and inflatable mattresses (to jump over). Time yourself and change the course, making it more difficult over time.

4. Stretch and warm up your muscles before and after dance or other exercise. Proper stretching will help improve your agility. Stiff muscles respond much more slowly than warmed up, stretched muscles. Also, the more limber you are, the less likely you are to get injured.

5. Dance frequently. Dancing is great exercise disguised as simple fun. Ballet and hip-hop are both excellent for improving agility, but any kind of dancing will be beneficial. Freestyle dancing is perfect, especially if you incorporate many different moves.

6. Condition your muscles. Body builders can tell you that muscle building exercises alone will not improve agility. To improve agility you must condition the muscles to respond fast. Try fast pushups, kickboxing, aerobics—all activities like these will help tone and strengthen your muscles in ways that will improve your agility.

Tips & Warnings

• Always warm up before exercising

• Agility depends much on how quickly muscles respond to signals from the brain. Agility training helps improve muscle response speed. Some actions can become nearly instantaneous

• Sudden stops, starts and turns can cause injury if you have not conditioned your muscles

• Always talk to your doctor before starting any new fitness training program

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• Agility training equipment