Definition of Agility – The quality of being agile; the power of moving the limbs quickly and easily; nimbleness; activity; quickness of motion; as, strength and agility of body.

Jump training

Hopping: What's good for high jumping is hopping as high as you can on each leg; if you can do it well on one, you'll do it even better on both. Another good one to do is to practice skipping.

Incidental leg strength: If you're waiting in a line or something, why not wait on one leg?

Hopping game: Training alone is boring. Train for jumping height with this game. Each player must hop onto one leg, they then kick at the others with their spare leg until they fall. The one who falls must swap legs. It's fun, competitive and really trains up those legs!

Build your own high jump/hurdle: Get three of those thin wooden sticks you get for gardening; they don't cost much. Simply jab two into the ground and then tie the third across at the required height. Should you not manage the jump you will simple break the stick, resulting in no injury. Now just use this once every day, upping the height when you feel confident.

Training arm strength

Climbing for climbing muscles: For things like walking on your hands or hoisting yourself up walls, you'll need strong arms – don't train for strong arms though, just train for the move, and the muscles will come to aid you. To prove my point, the arm strength you need for climbing will easily come if you keep climbing trees; you'll develop very strong forearms and lats this way.

Arm squatting: To train for a hand stand start off with squatting on your hands with your knees by your head. Now try to extend fully into a hand stand. This requires real strength where as it is possible to do a good handstand just by balancing.

All limbs together: To hurdle something high, you need to be able to split the effort between your legs and arms. To get good at doing this, hold onto a pull up bar and do lots of little jumps, helping yourself with your arms. Try to vary the ratio of how much weight you put on your arms and legs.

General tips

Power to weight ratio: For agility you need a good power to weight ratio; that means you want to be strong but not overly heavy. To achieve this you need not change your diet, just don't go using weight gain or anything as this is more for bodybuilders; not Martial Artists or Gymnasts. You want to build lean muscle mass so a protein shake might help, though even this might be excessive weight.

Overcoming the fear of flipping: One way to learn to front flip is to start with handspring vaults of the arms of chairs etc. (flipping but having your hands on the arm rest). Then just use your hands less and less, the fear won't be there as you'll know that if you fall you could just put your hands down on the arm. This can also work with mats; you can have one on its side to flip over, and one on the floor behind it to land on!

Mack LeMouse

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