Basketball SAQ Training–Speed, Agility, and Quickness

All athletes must be quick and able to stop and go. Speed and agility are displayed when you can travel at top speed and still effectively change direction. Basketball agility drills can contribute to improving speed and footwork, and this improves quickness, a key component of basketball training.

There are many factors influencing basketball speed and agility. It’s important to learn the best approaches to improve sport-specific quickness. Let’s look at how to improve sprinting mechanics, explosiveness, and agility for basketball.

Basketball’s Explosive First Step

Winning a matchup in basketball comes down to each player's initial movement. The goal is to be faster at sprinting, jumping, and performing lateral movements. This gives them a better chance to outrun an opponent. Training approaches for this can be implemented into any basketball drill. 

Power training itself can take an athlete's game performance to another level.

In basketball, some of the most common movement patterns are found in jump shots, layups, and many forceful steps. Being quick on the first step in the right direction can determine how well an athlete performs.

Footwork creates separation between players, which is how you can get ahead to score baskets. To improve explosiveness though, focus on plyometric exercises. These include but are not limited to,

• Reverse lunge knee drives

• Lateral bounds

• Box jumps

• Jump squat

• Single leg bounding

• Single leg box jump

Advance the training even more by adding in reaction time drills. Things like, ball drop drills, 4 cone reaction drills, and reaction sprints are great for improving response time or latency. It helps increase acceleration in different directions.

Speed and Quickness for Basketball

Speed drills come after building a base of force production and reaction time. Lateral speed and strength can be achieved by performing just an agility ladder drill. Have them apply explosive power to constant movement. Adding footwork to improve foot speed will create more turnover. More turnover means a faster athlete. 

Speed is a person's ability to move in one direction as fast as they can. Linear speed is the most popular form for measuring how fast an athlete is. Can they get from point A to point B quickly?

Quickness on the other hand refers to an athlete’s ability to change direction while moving at their top speed. Let’s review the speed and quickness drills basketball athletes can perform.

Speed Drills

Speed depends on body position, knee drive, and contact time. How fast you can pick your feet up and put them down determines your speed. Arm drive is also an important factor to this that is often undervalued.

To maintain proper body position your athlete must maintain their balance. 

A drill as simple as wall drives can help a basketball athlete remain in the upright position. It helps build strength while driving the knees up and pushing through the ground. The A skip and B skip are two simple technique-driven drills that assist in hip and knee alignment.

Bounding is another speed drill to help with hip drive and pulling through the foot when running. Adding in other sprinting drills such as forward falling sprints, flying 10s, and high knees will help. Be sure to always incorporate a high knee drill in between exercises. This tactic is used by many sport performance coaches.   

Quickness Drills

Mirror drills are an effective way to help athletes work on quickness. Body position constantly changes in these drills. As one player attempts to outrun the other they run linear and lateral. Within a 20-yard coned-off area they are constantly stopping and going.

Mountain climbers to a sprint is another exercise to help alter body position, accelerate, and produce force. Just a mountain climber sprint start to a sprint is highly effective. Basketball involves lots of jumping so you can also include variations of a long jump to lateral sprints.

Agility: Change of Direction

Agility tests are a great way to measure an athlete's change of direction. Basketball agility requires efficient acceleration, deceleration, and change of direction. Athletes rarely travel in a straight line.

An athlete's ability to speed up or slow down and change direction is agility. It is crucial to help athletes maintain balance as they accelerate and decelerate in different directions.

Incorporate speed ladder drills like the following to help:

• Icky shuffle

• 2 feet in and out

• Linear run

• Lateral quick steps

• Lateral shuffle

Quickness drills that work on agility without the ladder include the following:  

• Lateral shuffle hops

• Lateral cone steps

• Cone sprints

• X-drill

• 6 cone drills

Check out the ISSA blog for more drills to perform targeting change of direction and quickness without using an agility ladder.

Putting It All Together

You now know speed and agility principles to apply to training. You must also know how to structure these forms of training. Timing of these workouts is important to get the most out of them. Building a speed and agility workout for basketball should follow a format. 

Start each workout with a dynamic warm-up. This warm-up needs to address the movement patterns that will be targeted in the actual workout itself. 

For example, if it is a leg day, you must warm up the lower body. But if the focus of the workout is squats, then the warm-up might center on the hinge movement.

Following the warm-up should be a plyometrics segment. The body is primed for the workout and it is at its highest potential for producing maximum force–a state similar to a game setting. Working on acceleration drills and jumping exercises is important in this segment.

After plyometrics comes speed and agility. Gradually move into longer speed training or drills after plyometrics. Then finish the training off with agility drills with a focus on footwork and change of direction. 

Depending on the athlete and how their body responds to a workout, most will experience fatigue following an intense workout, so be sure to finish out your workout with proper recovery. 

Strength and conditioning training helps all athletes. You can see how basketball training comes down to technical training, especially for speed and agility. Become an ISSA Strength and Conditioning coach today. Help athletes improve all elements needed for basketball and many other sports.