Lateral Speed Training

If you have ever played a football video game, I am sure that you are aware of the make a player feature.  Many of us who enjoyed these games growing up can account to making a player with their favorite team.  Often times I created action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger at defensive end, Kobe Bryant at quarterback, and Ivan Drago at wide receiver.  You can often make the player have bulging muscles and manipulate their stats to be the most dominant athletes on the field.  One of the traits you can apply to the athlete is agility.  While agility is somewhat hard to define, as it often overlaps with what you can consider as acceleration, agility is best understood as the ability to move laterally and to stop and change speeds or direction quickly.  The phrase ‘to turn on a dime’ is often associated with agile athletes and the NFL combine measures it in the 20 and 60 yard dash events.  The 20 yard dash, also known as the pro agility test specifically tests three characteristics of an athlete’s agile movement: side stepping, crossover lateral running, and hip rotation to an anterior-posterior sprint.  Understanding the movements will help you score a lower time.  I was able to score a 4.09 in my senior year of high school, tying that of Marcus Vick’s combine score.  Because these three movements utilize the same muscles for the most part, the training regimen following should provide enough strength to move with agility. 

Lateral acceleration is characteristic in almost all sports, however it is often times the least trained. Developing lateral speed works with the same principles of forward speed; greater power output will result in greater speed.  A stronger athlete in the anterior posterior direction can display greater power output and greater speed than a weaker athlete given that all other factors are equal.  This is also true of an athlete strong in the lateral direction, or movements in the frontal plane.  By understanding the movements, we are able to develop muscles that will characterize good lateral speed.  When force is applied to move laterally, athletes are performing hip abduction: a movement characterized by the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, Sartorius and the Tensor Fasciae Latae as primary movers and the other muscles of the leg and abdomen as synergistic helpers, dynamic stabilizers, or antagonists (primarily the hip adductor muscles).  To develop these abductors, conventional machine and cable movements can be utilized, however, I have found the best exercises for the development of lateral speed are those that mimic the movement (law of specificity) and those that are most challenging (law of overload). 

To develop initial hip abductor strength, perform the following workouts:

·         Jane Fonda’s

·         Fire hydrants

·         Seated band abduction

·         Standing band/cable extension

More advanced athletes with established hip strength can now utilize these exercises:

·         Low Lateral band walks

·         Band lateral sprints

The abductors are not as large and powerful as those that extend and flex the hip and knee, however by working on the movements and gaining strength, lateral speed and subsequent agility will follow.  Progression, overload, and specificity are your friends.