Webinar Notes

author - melissa witmer strength and conditioning
boys sidestepping

Thanks for your interest in the Ultimate Results Coaching Academy and for your interest in the athletic development of the players that you coach.

Here are a few notes that will help you remember what we talked about in the webinar along with a few extra exercises and progressions.

All of these drills can be done at the end of the warmup or right after the warmup. The Movement Fundamental drills you can do at every practice. For the agility drills, it is best not to always to the same drills at every practice. You might try the Agility Drills below once or twice per week. In the Team Speed, Agility, and Fitness course you will have different types of drills (linear speed, agility, footwork, and vertical work) that you can cycle through.

Movement Fundamentals

Cook Hip Lift

Most modern humans spend too much time sitting. If you coach students or people with desk jobs, doing these every day can help counteract some of the negative effects of sitting. This exercise acts both as a glute strengthening exercises and as a hip flexor stretch for athletes who are very tight in the hip flexors. Basically if you spend most of your time sitting all day, your hips are spending most of the time in flexion. This exercise works on getting full hip extension. 

Bodyweight Squat

As a coach, you want to instill good movement fundamentals in your athletes. The body weight squat is a fundamental movement. It’s also easy to see a few common flaws which I talk about in this video. Look for knees caving in or athletes bending at the waist rather than hinging at the hips and ankles

Landing Fundamentals

Many injuries occur because an athlete cannot properly control the force of their own body weight in deceleration. Landing is a fundamental movement skill that should be practiced. Only after an athlete becomes efficient at absorbing the force of landing or decelerating can they become efficient at changing direction.

Bound and Stick

This exercises is about absorbing the force of the body on one foot. Absorbing and producing force on one leg is truly what agility is about.

Clock Drill

This is a nice progression of the bound and stick. Have your athletes bound and stick in a variety of directions. This is good for increasing general body and spacial awareness and balance.

Agility

Hockey Stop Shuffle

Here we are working on the position at the point of change of direction. This drill also works on getting the feet out from under the athletes center of mass. This is a concept will talk about more extensively in the Coaching Academy course.

5-10 Drill

This drill is a nice transition between the hockey stop drill and the full 5-10-5. Both this drill and the 5-10-5 are about increasing awareness of the hips and getting better movement efficiency in sharp changes of direction. For the 5-10 drill the goal is to move to the first cone without completely committing the hips.

5-10-5 Drill

In this drill, the athlete commits the hip after the first turn and then had to learn to open them again going into the second cone.

To see the effect of the above drills, check out the before and after movement efficiency. After a bit of instruction, the athletes open their hips better and change direction in a more efficient and coordinated manner.

This change was after just a bit of instruction and a few drills. Repeated drilling will help these athletes move with the same efficiency in their cutting on the field.