Athlete or not, the power- and speed-building agility ladder is worth including in your toolkit.
Do More With is a series highlighting equipment around the Club that can help you reach your fitness goals. In this installment, we highlight the agility ladder, available on the Club floor.
Unless you’re a pickleball enthusiast, regular on your Club’s basketball court, or athlete on a recreational sports team, agility training may not be your top priority.
But agility is simply moving quickly with coordination and control — and that’s a skill everyone can benefit from developing. One way you can strengthen it: Practice drills on the agility ladder.
Similar to a standard ladder, an agility ladder is designed with evenly spaced, flat rungs and can span anywhere from 10 to 30 feet. Instead of climbing, you’ll place this nylon ladder directly on the ground and step or hop between the plastic slats as quickly as possible. The barrier to entry is minimal. And it's so versatile, folks early on in their fitness journey, advanced members, and everyone in between can experience a challenging workout with the equipment.
Here’s why.
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Why Train with the Agility Ladder
Regardless of your fitness goals and experience, agility training is valuable. A small 2023 study of older adults suggests that agility ladder training is linked with improvements in physical performance, muscle power, agility, and balance. These benefits can not only improve your workouts, but they can also help keep you safe outside of the Club.
You never know what life is going to throw at you. Sometimes, it’s an icy, slick sidewalk as you walk home from work or a giant rock on the path as you run through the park. You need to be agile in order to catch yourself if you start to slip on the pavement or quickly dash around the tripping hazard on the trail. Essentially, agility training helps you react rapidly enough to reduce your risk of falling and injuring yourself.
Runners in particular can benefit from training with the agility ladder. It may not seem like it, but running is a single-leg activity, and you need to be equally explosive and stable on each leg. Ladder drills like single-leg hops can help you improve both of those elements, as you’ll practice leaping into the air and falling with control on one leg.
Unlike other agility tools, the ladder is relatively safe, particularly for lower-body training. With plyo boxes, there’s a risk of falling or scraping your shins as you try to leap up on top of the risers. Since the ladder is flush against the floor and its “steps” are flat, there’s minimal risk of tripping.
You can move through the ladder as slowly as you need when you first start out — another safety perk. But as you start to feel more comfortable and coordinated, the agility ladder can also check off the box for cardiovascular training; jumping over each rung, with both feet like a “bunny hop” or with one leg, will definitely get your heart rate up.
Aside from day-to-day training, the agility ladder can be a valuable tool for benchmarking your fitness progress. For example, you can time yourself making your way down the ladder, stepping in and out of each box, then revisit and try to beat that time in six weeks or so.
How to Use the Agility Ladder
Before you use the agility ladder in your routine, make sure you’re comfortable with maintaining your balance, particularly doing unilateral (aka single-side) movement. You should be able to do a forward and lateral step-up on a box that’s about six inches tall; you’re going to constantly be moving your feet outside of your center of gravity while running through an agility ladder, so you need to be sure you’re able to keep control during those movements.
When you’re ready to test out the ladder, ease in slowly. Start with marches or walking sideways on the outside of the ladder. Take one lateral step, then tap your toes forward into the boxes. Repeat this process all the way to the end of the ladder, then repeat on the opposite side so your other leg is stepping first. It’s important to break down the movement pattern and fully understand it in its most basic form before you try hops and jumps. In my opinion, you have to earn the right to jump. And walking through the technique and honing fundamental movement patterns, like squats, are prerequisites to complex exercises like jumping.
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Ready for more difficulty? Pick up your pace, quickly tapping your feet one at a time into the boxes while shuffling laterally down the ladder. You can also do single-leg hops, lateral high knees, or forward shuffles (start with both feet on the outside of the ladder, step them into the ladder one at a time, step out to the other side of the ladder, then repeat, moving forward to the next box).
You don’t always need to use your feet, either. Get creative with bear crawls or lateral push-ups, taking a step out to one side in a high plank position, doing a push-up, and then stepping into the next box. Rinse and repeat. You can also play around with the timing of your drills; place them at the top of your workout when you’re feeling fresh and energized or add them as a finisher to burn out your body.
Remember, everyone is at a different point in their fitness journey, and the drills you see star athletes performing online may not be in your wheelhouse yet — and that’s okay. Use the agility ladder in a way that matches your goals, experience, and confidence level, and you’re sure to see the benefits.
Alex Dowhal is a COACH + at Equinox Yorkville in Toronto. Dowhal has worked at Equinox for five and a half years and is a Level 1 Applied Health and Human Performance Specialist. Dowhal has also completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training, holds certifications from Precision Nutrition and in kettlebell training, and is a long-distance runner currently training for the Boston marathon.