My Favorite Agiltity Drill - Lateral - Crossover Run (Mathias Kiwanuka, Ryan Grant)

If you breakdown what agility is you get 2 movement skills, Deceleration and Re-acceleration. Sounds easy right? Not really, in order to efficiently Decelerate you must first train the Central Nervous System (CNS)  to utilize the appropriate muscle groups in the appropriate sequence (Look for my blog about Jumping and Landing Mechanics later next week). After that we need to make sure that the athlete has the unilateral stabilization to control the movement and then the strength and power to be able to absorb the force and reapply it into another direction.
The Lateral - Crossover Run Drill Challenges an athletes ability to control body position, change levels, and get in and out of the direction changes as quickly as possible. Take a look at NY Giants DE Mathias Kiwanuka performing the drill below.

Notice how the body position and angles change as the drill is performed, in order to put ourselves in the optimal re-acceleration position we have to maintain control of our body angle upon the start of deceleration. In order to progress this drill we then add a pure acceleration component to the drill. This drastically increases the load to the plant leg and helps to promote the shorter amortization phase which we are emphasizing on the change of direction component of the drill. Below you will see both Mathias and Ryan Grant do an excellent job of maintaining body control and rapidly decelerating and re-accelerating off the plant leg as they transition to acceleration.



I would say Grants ankle looks pretty good!