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Many soccer players and athletes are always looking for ways to improve their overall speed, and what drills and exercises they should do to be quicker and more powerful on the pitch.
And as much as social media and the internet has been a great resource in providing players with exceptional drills that they can do on their own, it's also been the source of lots of misconceptions for many players concerning their speed development.
Many fitness and sports influencers in the speed development niche, have romanticized the idea of footwork and agility ladder training as being the MAIN WAY to improve your SAQ (speed, agility, and quickness).
This has led many players down the wrong path when training for speed, and causing them to perform drills that aren't necessarily beneficial for their athleticism for their particular sport.
However, that doesn't mean that footwork and coordination training isn't essential for all athletes in their sport. There are many different drills and exercises that challenge your body and neuromuscular system in a way that benefits your performance. your quickness and speed as a player.
In this blog post, you will learn how to effectively apply footwork and coordination into your SAQ training.
What is SAQ?
SAQ training refers to your training for Speed, Agility, and Quickness.
These three terms have become synonymous for many people, since they are very similar in different ways.
However, these three concepts have their own unique expressions in athleticism, and must be trained in different ways.
Speed can be defined as an athlete's ability to reach one point to another quickly. This is mostly associated with max velocity and sprint mechanics to be able to reach top speed in a linear direction. Think of this as your 40-yard dash. You are solely working on incorporating the right technique, such as lengthening your stride, keeping an upright posture, and applying proper frontside and backside mechanics.
Agility can be defined as an athletes ability to be able to quickly decelerate, and re-accelerate into a different direction when reacting to an external cue. Usually many speed coaches use change of direction drills to improve this skill of being able to decelerate, readjust and explode into another direction, before incorporating cognitive type drills to actually work on the reactive portion of agility.
Quickness can be defined as an athlete's ability to change their body posture and position with speed. This can be a movement such as flipping your hips when defending an attacker in soccer, or the way you are able to adjust your feet and balance quickly when under pressure.
By training these three aspects of your athleticism, alongside a proper strength training program with supplemental plyometric work, you will see the best results in your speed development on the pitch.
If you'd like to read more about how to improve your speed for soccer, check out his blog post: How to Improve Your Sprint Speed For Soccer | The 3 Keys to Improve Your Speed
You can also download our FREE SPEED GUIDE which is full of tips and drills for your to read so you can learn to properly train for speed.
How do Footwork and Coordination Apply to SAQ?
"A lot of it is cognitive learning and coordination and stuff like that, but it all depends on how you are using it," says Certified Speed Coach Tierre "Tee" Jones (CSCS) from The Speed System, who has a lot of experience training a variety of athletes in different sports.
"I've seen people do something like where they come up and they do like this back step, where they step behind their leg to touch the ladder. Great for Coordination, but not essential to their sport. Like, when are you ever going to do that in your sport?"
The problem with many of the 'speed' drills you might find on social media, is that too many footwork and ladder drills that are shown have no real translation to your actual sport.
People focus too much on performing fancy feet movement patterns that look amazing and impressive, but won't actually be applicable to actual movements in a game that require you to be quick and coordinated.
Like Coach Tee mentioned, a drill like the 'behind the leg' crossover step might look fancy and cool, but it will not help you as a soccer player and how quick you are with your body when defending, because you don't actually perform that movement in a game.
In order to be able to improve your SAQ, the footwork drills you do must be specific to your sport, and they must challenge you in a way that will actually improve the way your neuromuscular system is able to respond to stimulus.
"It all depends on how you use it," Says Coach Tee, "For example, in a lot of our footwork drills— if you notice from our posts a lot— We start our athletes in a stationary position, and a lot of time what we do, is that we sprint up to the ladder, or we sprint up to the cones.
"What this does is that it gives you some type of game scenario, because you're gonna have to be able to accelerate, and decelerate, do your move, and accelerate again.
"If you are doing a ladder drill, sprint 5-10 yards to the ladder, break down, do your drill, and sprint out, that makes it a little more game realistic for your sport."
Make sure to check out @the_speed_system on their Instagram for a variety of SAQ drills to help make you a faster player on the pitch!
Big thanks to Coach Tee for his insight on footwork and coordination, and how they translate over to speed development. If you're interested in finding more speed drills to elevate your performance on the pitch, make sure you check out The Speed System on Instagram.
Like Coach Tee mentioned, your footwork and coordination training, whether you're a soccer player or an athlete in general, should be tailored and specific to the type of movements you might perform in a match.
Although many people find footwork and coordination drills to be useless for overall speed development, the truth is, there are many different ways where training your coordination will influence your speed, agility and quickness!
With speed, your footwork and coordination mostly come into play with speed mechanics and technique, and how you're able to coordinate your body when sprinting. Although the agility ladder and fast feet drills might not be the most effective training method for speed, incorporating coordination drills that work on your max velocity mechanics will definitely translate over to how fast you are able to sprint. Remember, coordination means how well you are able to move your body when performing an action. So speed mechanics definitely falls under this category.
With agility, an athlete needs to be able to accelerate quickly, break down by decelerating, change their direction, and then reaccelerate. Like Coach Tee mentioned, by using drills where you are working on being able to apply that switch will translate over to how fast you are able to change direction in your sport.
However, that doesn't mean that you should completely focus on footwork and coordination drills when trying to improve your agility. This is because footwork and coordination only play a part in your overall agility. If you really want to develop the ability react and to change direction quickly, Change of Direction Drills should be the bulk of your training.
With quickness, this is where footwork and coordination mainly come into play. Quickness is the ability to move your body and readjust your posture in different scenarios. Like mentioned before, a typical example you might see in soccer would be the hip flip, the crossover step, or the lateral shuffle.
By performing footwork and coordination drills that directly target these specific match-realistic movements, you will see benefits in the way you are able to adjust your body and your footing in your sport.
So Will Using the Agility Ladder Improve My Speed and Agility?
The best answer to this question is, it depends.
Many of the 'footwork' and 'agility' drills you see on Instagram and YouTube, might not actually have a huge translation to your sport. Several studies on the topic of agility ladder training on youth and advanced athletes have found minimal to no difference in the speed, agility, and dribbling ability of a control group with a group doing ladder drills.
This is mostly because the drills that the players were performing weren't challenging them enough to actually see any improvements in their speed.
Your biggest goal when training for SAQ, is to improve your body's neuromuscular ability to be quick, fast, and explosive. The problem with the agility ladder is that it doesn't challenge the neuromuscular system enough to the point where it can generate more power and quickness to develop your speed.
Coach Abraham Armas, CSCS, from Armas Strength And Conditioning, explains this really well in this YouTube video:
So Should You Use Ladders?
Of course you can use ladders. They are an essential training tool ONLY when they are used properly.
If you would like to read more about agility ladder training and how to use your ladder effectively, check out this blog post on our website: Is Agility Ladder Training Effective? Benefits and the Misconceptions on Agility Ladder Training (gogrindsoccer.com)
Big thanks to Coach Armas who let use use his in-depth video! Make sure to check out his page on Instagram as well, he offers great speed, agility, and power drills to help take your game to the next level. @armasstrengthdfw
Summary On How to Train For Footwork and Coordination
In order to see improvement in your athletic performance and your SAQ, footwork and coordination must be implemented in order to teach your neuromuscular system to be quick.
When training your footwork and your coordination, you want to make sure you are doing drills that challenge your neuromuscular system in a way that directly translates to your sport.
This could be as simple as practicing specific movements you might encounter in a game, such as the hip flip or crossover step when defending an attacker in soccer.
You could also challenge your neuromuscular system by using reaction-type drills, where you have to adjust your body, and be able to move in the direction of that cue.
Don't just limit your footwork training to the ladder, make sure you practice your footwork in order ways as well! Just like Coach Tee from The Speed System mentioned, a great way to improve match-scenario coordination is by sprinting to a set of cones, breaking down, and performing a footwork type drill and reaccelerating.
You can also use footwork as a great way to activate your body and get your feet coordinated before you jump into the intense 'bulk' of the session, like sprints and changes of direction, just like Coach Armas mentions in his video.
The big takeaway from this blog post, is that you SHOULD NOT use those fancy, over-the-top footwork drills you could encounter on social media as an influence to your speed development. Make sure you do your research as to which footwork and coordination drills will actually translate to your performance on the pitch.
Thanks for Reading! Get Up. Go GRIND.
Big thanks again to Coach Tee from The Speed System and Coach Armas from Armas Strength and Conditioning!
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