Research · Speed & Agility

Do Agility Ladders Actually Make You More Agile? What the Research Says

By Muhammad Dzulhisham · MSc Sports Coaching, NSCA-CSCS

Walk into almost any youth football, basketball or field hockey session in Singapore and there is a good chance of seeing it: a bright nylon ladder laid flat on the turf, an athlete high-stepping through it in a blur of quick feet, a coach calling out variations — icky shuffle, in-in-out-out, lateral quick step. It looks like agility training. It sounds like agility training. It photographs well for a training reel. The question worth asking with the research in hand, rather than the assumption, is whether it actually is agility training in the sense that matters for competition — or whether it trains a narrower skill, moving quickly through a fixed and memorised pattern, that does not reliably show up on a field where nothing is fixed and nothing is announced in advance.

What researchers mean by "agility" — and why a ladder does not quite test it

The most cited definition in the strength and conditioning literature comes from a 2006 review by John Sheppard and Warren Young in the Journal of Sports Sciences. It proposed that agility is "a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus."¹ That final clause — in response to a stimulus — is doing most of the work. It splits agility into two separate components: change-of-direction speed (CODS), the purely physical capacity to decelerate, redirect and re-accelerate along a path, and a perceptual and decision-making layer sitting on top of it — visual scanning, anticipating an opponent, recognising a pattern, reading a situation and choosing a response in real time. Only the second component turns a change of direction into agility, by this definition, because only it involves reacting to something that was not known in advance.

An agility ladder is, on this framework, a closed-skill footwork and coordination drill at best. The pattern of foot placement is fixed and rehearsed before the set begins. There is no opponent to read, no ball to track, no decision about which square comes next. That does not automatically make the drill worthless. It does mean that, by the field's own working definition of the thing it is named after, a ladder is training and testing something different from what most coaches are actually trying to buy when they call it "agility work."

Two skills that look alike but score as unrelated

This distinction would not matter much in practice if CODS and reactive agility turned out to be, functionally, the same ability wearing two names. The data says they are not. Young, Dawson and Henry's 2015 analysis in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching concluded that change-of-direction speed and true reactive agility behave as independent skills, reporting that agility tests discriminate higher-standard from lower-standard athletes in invasion sports far better than CODS tests do.² That gap is the tell: the perceptual component a CODS test leaves out is not a minor omission. It is closer to the part of the skill that actually separates elite athletes from the rest.

A 2018 study by Čoh and colleagues in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research pushed the comparison further by controlling for the one variable that might have explained the gap: the movement pattern itself. Using a light-based reactive training system, athletes completed an identical spatial change-of-direction task under two conditions — once pre-planned, once as a reaction to an unpredictable light cue — and the study still found significant differences in completion time between the two conditions, across four different spatial configurations.³ Same feet, same angles, same distances covered. The only variable that changed was whether the brain had to decide in real time, and that alone was enough to move the result. If CODS and reactive agility diverge even when the footwork is literally identical, a coordination drill with no stimulus at all — no decision built in anywhere — has even less claim to training the reactive half of the skill.

Warren Young returned to this exact argument in 2021, co-authoring a paper in Sports Medicine – Open bluntly titled "It's Time to Change Direction on Agility Research: A Call to Action." Its case against pre-planned drills as a stand-in for game agility is direct:

"In invasion sports, pre-planned change-of-direction scenarios either do not occur in competition, or are extremely rare."

The same paper goes further, noting that when researchers have actually gone looking for evidence that developing change-of-direction qualities through training carries over into reactive, game-based agility, the training studies needed to answer that question directly simply do not yet exist.⁴ That is an uncomfortable gap for a drill as widely prescribed as the ladder: the transfer it is implicitly sold on has never been demonstrated, mostly because almost nobody has tested for it directly.

The older evidence already predicted this

None of this is a new argument dressed up as a fresh discovery. Two decades before "reactive agility" became its own research category, Young, McDowell and Scarlett ran a six-week training study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research comparing straight-line sprint training against change-of-direction training, then tested both groups across six agility tests of increasing complexity, ranging from two to five changes of direction. Sprint training produced significant gains in straight-line speed but only limited transfer to the agility tests — and, tellingly, the more directional changes a test required, the less the sprint training transferred to it.⁵ Complexity and specificity moved together: the further a drill sat from the demands of the target task, the less it had to offer that task, in either direction. A closed, memorised footwork-pattern drill sits about as far from a reactive, decision-driven sprint as a training exercise reasonably can.

What happens when the ladder itself gets put to the test

Prediction from theory is one thing; a direct test on athletes is more convincing. In 2020, Padrón-Cabo and colleagues ran exactly that test on eighteen youth soccer players, average age 12, splitting them into a ladder-training group and a normal-training control group for three sessions a week over six weeks. Both groups were measured before and after on 10m and 20m sprint time, a general agility test, a dribbling-speed test and a slalom-dribbling test, in a study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics.⁶ Both groups improved their sprint times by a similar margin — the ladder group by roughly 2.4%, the control group by roughly 2.5% — and there were no significant between-group differences on any measure, including the agility and dribbling tests the ladder work was specifically meant to influence. Six weeks of dedicated ladder training produced no measurable advantage over simply continuing normal soccer training.

The pattern holds across the wider literature

That result is not an outlier. A 2023 systematic review in the Journal of Human Kinetics by Forster, Uthoff, Rumpf and Cronin pooled data from 20 studies and 638 subjects across seven training methods used to improve pro-agility shuttle performance, ranking them by effect size produced per training session.⁷ The order was not close:

• Sprint training — the largest per-session effect of any method reviewed, incline sprinting especially
• Plyometric training — second largest, multiplanar exercises performing best
• Resistance training — third, with unilateral work outperforming bilateral
• Change-of-direction / footwork-pattern training — the smallest effect of any single method in the review

The authors' explanation for the gap is a specificity argument, not simply a training-volume one: sprint-based change-of-direction drills provide, in their words, greater exercise specificity to the pro-agility task than the small, multi-dimensional movements performed inside a ladder. A ladder trains fast, controlled foot placement in a tiny, fixed footprint — a real skill on its own terms, just not the same mechanical or perceptual demand as changing direction at speed over open ground.

Not nothing — just not what it is marketed as

None of this means the ladder belongs in a bin. It is a low-load, low-skill-barrier way to build rhythm, foot-ground contact awareness and general coordination, and it holds up reasonably well as a warm-up activation tool before the parts of a session that do more mechanical or reactive work. The issue is specifically the claim attached to it: that this closed, memorised, unopposed pattern constitutes "agility training" in the sense that matters for a sport where nothing is memorised and everything is opposed. The evidence does not suggest the drill is harmful. It suggests the drill is mislabelled, and that the label is doing a lot of unearned marketing work — ladders are cheap, visually impressive on camera, and easy to sell as agility work to parents who have no easy way to check the claim against the literature.

There is a reasonable caveat inside all of this specificity research, and it is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: the case against ladder work is strongest for open, invasion-style team sports — football, basketball, netball, rugby, hockey — where competitive movement is overwhelmingly reactive and opponent-driven. Closed-skill sports and events with a fixed, memorised movement sequence, such as a track hurdles approach, a gymnastics routine or a fixed obstacle course, sit much closer to what a ladder actually trains. The research is not a blanket verdict on footwork drills everywhere. It is a specific warning about assuming a closed drill develops an open skill, in exactly the sports where Singapore's youth and school athletes spend most of their competitive hours.

What the evidence says actually transfers

A 2022 scoping review by Thieschäfer and Büsch in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living looked specifically at what makes agility trainable in youth athletes, organising the evidence by how closely a given drill preserved what the authors call perception-action coupling — reacting to a real or simulated stimulus, rather than executing a pattern that was memorised in advance.⁸ Small-sided games and drills built around reactive, unpredictable cues produced the clearest improvements in actual reactive agility. Low-specificity drills, footwork ladders included, showed inconsistent carry-over into reactive agility performance, even in programs where they built other qualities well.

A 2016 study on sub-elite under-11 soccer players makes the same point from a different angle. Trecroci and colleagues put preadolescents through twelve weeks of speed-agility-quickness (SAQ) training — the ladder-and-cone family of drills, essentially — and found a significant improvement in reactive agility and 5m acceleration, but no significant change in change-of-direction-speed performance.⁹ Where the training program happened to include a genuinely reactive, decision-based element, reactive agility improved. Where the task stayed a fixed pattern, it did not move the fixed-pattern test either. The thread running through all of this research is consistent: what gets trained transfers to what it resembles, and not reliably to much else.

The practical takeaway

None of this argues against footwork drills, coordination work, or a ladder as one small tool inside a session. It argues against treating a ladder as the mechanism for the thing coaches are actually trying to buy — a footballer who can change direction on an opponent's cue, a netballer who reads a passing lane and reacts before it closes, a rugby player who commits a defender to the wrong space. That skill has a perceptual half that a fixed pattern of squares on the ground cannot reach, no matter how fast the feet move through it. Building it requires training that keeps the decision inside the drill: reactive cues, unpredictable stimuli, small-sided games, contested one-on-one scenarios — the categories the research keeps identifying as the ones that actually carry over to competition. Before any drill earns a place in a program, the honest question is what it has actually been shown to transfer to, not what it looks like it should.