For many people, myself included, a video summary is a bit more engaging than a research article. Hopefully, this will give you a good summary and entice you to dig deeper by reading the full article.
Nimphius, S., Callaghan, S., Bezodis, N., & Lockie, R. (2018). Change of direction and agility tests: Challenging our current measures of performance. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 40(1), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1519/SSC.0000000000000309
If you want to see more research within this area, please follow this link to my published research in COD and Agility.
However, if you were keen to understand where I am now in my thinking. Then read on…
I suppose the assessment of COD and Agility is becoming exhausting. Even the small summary that we put together for this article seemed huge (special thank you to Sam Callaghan who created those massive tables!). The raw physical performance (e.g. COD speed tests) I think people have a good handle on, but the “agility test” is like asking how long is a piece of string… After going down the “sport-specific perceptual-cognitive” route and a series of articles where we examined generic stimuli then moved on to more ‘advanced’ methods with specific video stimuli I have come full circle to thinking for physical performance there are some strong advantages to the generic stimuli. First, if you do two things “kind of well” you sometimes end up doing neither well at all. This is the case with the "more sport specific stimuli” with videos we started using (see Tania Spiteri’s Ph.D. research when we were using video of an elite basketball player using several common moves). Even then it was just a one-on-one scenario which is somewhat realistic but if there were two defenders on one side, would you really only make your decision based on the person in front? Likely not (w/ 100% certainty) and for that and many other reasons, we really can’t replicate true “game scenarios” except for the game itself (scouting is still an important exercise to establish the decision making ability of an athlete!). However, it was definitely a great body of work completed for a Ph.D.! However, after that completion, I couldn’t help but continue thinking….
There is so much we aren’t assessing in the “agility tests” using the above scenarios (which are the most common) that lends itself to question, from a physical performance perspective (my bias and purpose) what are we trying to examine? Well, really we want to know how well someone does when it is the “worst-case scenario” e.g. last-minute decision, someone broke you down and you’re left standing with your shorts (anyone who plays basketball knows this taunt very well)… can you recover (performance) or as I like to say “succeed despite” or do you literally break (injury)?
As a result of that long-winded (and there are so many more steps to our thought process for research purposes), I have actually moved back to the generic stimuli. The reason being is to evaluate how the system responds in the most “physically demanding situation” and the physical demand here is often measured by the joint at most risk (the knee) and the research from the UWA group as part of Marcus Lee’s Ph.D. work with Assoc Prof Jacqueline Alderson and colleagues that demonstrated in comparison to even 3D Stereoscopic projections (life-like as you can get in the lab so far) with one or two defenders that the highest knee valgus moments occurred in the generic stimuli (interested in this research, check it out here).
So we’ve flipped the script, we’re merely using perception-response scenarios to reduce the time available for the motor system to respond! Instead of doing something we aren’t doing well anyhow (making the perceptual-motor task truly representative) no matter how fancy our lab setups were getting. This short time frame creates an environment that results in the greatest “physical demand” or risk and if you tolerate the risk, then the next question is, can you perform? Again, not saying this is good to determine who’s best at agility in every situation or scenario (is that even possible?), but it is advantageous to see how someone performs despite their ability to “read the game” because it is these scenarios (no one is perfect) where something “goes wrong” that often defines a key point in the game or at worst a potential injury. So there we have it. I’ve gone full circle. However, that isn’t to say we don’t have things to learn from the more representative assessments in the lab but when you’re trying to see “worst-case scenario” in a lab, you don’t’ have time to go through 100s of trials till you “get someone” caught off guard. If we can evaluate someone in the worst-case then we can work our way back up to submaximal movements.
This lends itself to our next area that we are examining or at least my thinking, is this continuum of worst-case scenario versus repeated common movements that ingrain or over time perpetuate a motor pattern that causes one to avoid the development of other patterns that aren’t necessarily the best but are needed when certain situations arise. This idea of having a suite of movement solutions available to handle several scenarios, not just the one scenario we test (e.g. fastest time). However, this is easier said than done from a research perspective and definitely from a data analysis perspective - even harder from a practical perspective! We have done it in the research (or at least started it)… for a series of movements and I already feel sorry for Daniel Kadlec who has been processing this data for months. However, hopefully, this will help us in our next movement of the needle to know just a bit more even if it does seemingly swing us right around to where we started. We then get to that start, a lot more informed, it isn’t the same as starting over!
Till the next time, I decide to regurgitate my thoughts on paper…
Doc Soph