Would you like to improve your overall fitness, strength, and agility? You don’t think you have the time? Well, what if we told you you could do all of this in less than one hour? Regymen Fitness is your newest obsession you didn’t know you needed. Our powerfully designed workouts are programmed to give you the most effective exercise tailored to your individual needs, all without wasting your time. In this article, we will focus on agility training and you will learn nine reasons why having an agility program is so important – plus the best methods to maximize your workouts.
Why Focus on Agility Training?
Many times when you hear the word “agility,” you automatically think of athletes, sports, quick movements, and speed. However, agility isn’t so cut and dried. You don’t have to be an athlete to improve your agility fitness.
If you think you have to be a certain age, demographic, or at a certain skill level to work on agility, we hope to change your mind by the end of this read.
Everyone can benefit from incorporating agility training into their workout regimen.
If you are new to working out, you may not know where to start, but we hope this guide will give you the tools to start. Perhaps you are a seasoned pro but have felt uninspired with your workouts. What we have to share will encourage you to get back stronger and more focused than ever.
1. Improve Your Quality of Life
Regular exercise is proven to reduce your risk of diseases, help manage current health issues, improve your mental fitness, strengthen your bones, and that’s just to name a few.
No matter what your daily life is like, you are constantly performing physical movements that agility training can improve. As we age, we naturally lose mobility and movement – you know the old saying, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
Now more than ever, it’s imperative to focus on functional workouts that help improve your quality of life. As more individuals work from home, it is easy to skip the gym session. This can lead to negative health consequences, which we will discuss shortly.
If you start focusing now on incorporating or improving agility in your workouts, you can begin to shift the tides in your favor and keep your body strong as you perform your daily tasks. Not only does adding these exercises into your life strengthen your body, but also your mind.
2. Reduce Your Risk of Injury
Increasing your agility can greatly reduce your risk of injury – both short- and long-term. A study conducted on pilots revealed, “Increased anaerobic endurance and neuromuscular control could have contributed to less muscular fatigue and therefore, lowered the risk of injuries.”
When you add agility exercises and drills into your weekly program, you improve your body’s alignment and core strength, which ultimately helps prevent serious injuries.
How many people do you know who have suffered an injury from doing a relatively mundane action like stepping off a sidewalk? They may attribute the injury to clumsiness.
While that may have something to do with it, the fact is agility exercises help fine-tune your motor skills in conjunction with a strength training program.
For example, adding in fast-foot work at the beginning of your leg day can help strengthen your ankles, improve your coordination, and challenge your smaller muscles in ways heavy lifts cannot.
When you “fine-tune” your smaller, secondary muscles through different types of drills you support and strengthen the primary muscles. A strong, well-conditioned body is less likely to succumb to injury.
And, while injuries are common, your extra attention to agility work can help any injuries you suffer to be less serious.
3. Increase Your Flexibility
Agility training helps increase your muscle’s reactivity time. By incorporating short bursts of agility-driven exercises like lateral movements and side shuffle drills, we increase our muscle’s quick reaction to varying movement patterns.
After incorporating these exercises into your routine for several weeks, you may start to notice your calves are a little less tight during your run or your hamstrings feel more elongated during your deadlifting session.
By training our body as a whole and not just individual parts, we increase our muscle flexibility to perform non-agility exercises even better. If your flexibility is increased, you are also less prone to extreme muscle soreness after exercises – even the tough ones!
4. Strengthen Your Entire Body
Your core is hard at work during most, if not all, physical exercise. Many clients make the mistake of putting their core into a very small box labeled “abs,” but your core is central to your strength.
The core includes your diaphragm, pelvic floor (women and men have pelvic floors so this isn’t just for the ladies), internal/external obliques, multifidus, erector spinae, and rectus abdominis.
If that seems like a lot more than just your abdominal muscles, that’s because it is. Your core is a powerhouse! During agility drills, your core is engaged to keep your spine stable, your hips in alignment, your glutes fired up, and your lateral movements strong.
The quick pace of agility movements means your core must be engaged to properly support your body – if not, you risk feeling strain in your low back, glutes, and hamstrings.
Proper engagement of your core during agility is imperative to safe, effective workouts. Our team at Regymen is dedicated to science-based methods to educate and empower our clients inside and outside of the gym.
5. Better Calorie Burn
The more muscles you recruit during your training sessions, the more caloric burns you achieve. Add in more than one modality and you can achieve even greater results.
Regymen is where effectiveness and energy yield exciting results. Our workouts are for everyone, no matter where you are on your fitness journey. Every signature class is intended to torch your calorie burn in a short, but effective amount of time.
In as little as 30 minutes, you will work your body from the top to the bottom in our pre-programmed Burn, Box, Build, Rumble, and Blast classes. Our classes are designed to keep effectiveness at a high while utilizing functional movements, agility, stability, and balance exercises.
6. Create Better Muscle Memory
Agility exercises utilize Type 2 muscle fibers – also known as “fast-twitch” muscles. Fast-twitch muscles are responsible for powerful movements and fatigue faster than slow-twitch, or Type 1, muscle fibers.
Using your fast-twitch muscles during agility training burns more calories, builds muscle, and enables you to advance to more progressed movements. Muscle memory is your body’s neurological ability to recall movement better and faster through repetitive movements.
Your muscles will become stronger and quicker as your muscle memory gets stronger. Eventually, the exercises and drills you began with will become easier compared to when you first started – then, you’ll know it’s time to progress!
7. Challenges Mental Fitness
If you have practiced agility work or drills before, you know they make you think fast on your feet. Your mind-muscle connection must work together to perform lateral movements, quick foot movements, jumps, and similar moves that demand coordination and focus.
We mentioned earlier how fitness is more than physical and the cognitive workout your brain undergoes during intentional, agility drills is not to be undermined. Keeping your mind agile is something to keep focused on as you choose what workouts are right for you and your body.
By engaging your mind during agility exercises, you are adding quality of life to your years. Agility training enables your brain to be challenged and stay active in ways it may not be receiving in your daily life.
If you find yourself working a sedentary job, your brain may be getting less exercise than it could, or should, be. Agility-focused training gives you the opportunity to work both your body and your brain – it’s a win-win!
8. More Effective Workouts
You now know agility training improves everything from your quality of life to your flexibility to your mental fitness. But, what about future workouts? The great thing about incorporating full-body agility work is you are always progressing and finding new ways to push through plateaus.
Everyone plateaus at some point, but the important thing is to not let this be a deterrent. If you have the tools to work smarter and challenge your body in new ways, you can push through times where progress may seem slow.
By keeping your body in motion through all ranges and planes of motion, you make progress every time you workout. Challenging yourself in your workouts will vary through different seasons of life. Giving yourself an opportunity to train with intention and focus will enable you to shift your goals as life changes.
9. Helps Recovery Period
We have talked a lot about being active, but rest is equally as important. Rest days play a vital role in your body’s ability to heal and rebuild your muscles. Over-training can lead to injury, burnout, or even illness.
Effective, short, intense workouts utilize your muscles to their maximum capacity. You’re dealing with quality work over quantity. As hard as you work, it is important to give that same dedication to your body’s recovery period.
When your body is able to rest, it is able to repair torn muscles, build lean muscle mass, fight off disease, and lower your heart rate and blood pressure.
The Best Training Methods
The best training methods start with intention and programming. Finding a workout method that is fresh and challenging will keep you on your toes and coming back for more.
Your time in the gym does not have to be a marathon session. One of the best ways to make the most out of your time in the gym is to keep your heart rate elevated and practice different modalities of workouts – that’s where we come in!
Optimal agility training routines combine full-body movements from footwork to hand-eye coordination to explosive power moves. Classes at our Regymen Fitness studios give you a wide variety of workout programs that fit every type of fitness level and preference.
Find Your Community
Let’s face it – working out can be difficult. You can easily feel overwhelmed, defeated, lost, and unsure. Finding a community that is right for you is crucial to the longevity and success of the goals you have set for yourself.
Regymen Fitness has classes that incorporate a variety of modalities to suit most preferences. Every skill level is welcome in our classes, and you will always have a coach nearby to support you and keep your form in proper alignment.
Our workouts are created to get you up and moving and up and out of the gym in a short amount of time. We are not just focused on health goals, but on mental strength and social engagement. We know fitness is not a one-size-fits-all and we want your experience at Regymen to be your best yet.
If you enjoy treadmill work, we got you covered. If you are more about heavy strength training with mixed cardio – we’re on it. You might prefer some boxing rounds with a few kicks and punches – we’ve got that, too.
If you crave a mix of all of these types of workouts, you will love our Rumble program.
Ready to Reach Your Agility Training Goals?
We have 20 locations with educated coaches ready to help you achieve your agility training goals.
If you are ready to take your fitness to the next level and get serious about your fitness goals, contact us and come join us for a FREE class. Let’s get stronger, together!