Most players call any fast-feet drill an agility drill. By the usual sports science definition, many aren't. Agility means you change speed or direction in response to a cue, like the ball coming off your opponent's racket. If you already know where you're going, that's change of direction. Here's what the research says and how to train reaction alone or with a partner.
What agility really is
In 2006 Sheppard and Young proposed a definition. Agility is a rapid whole-body movement with a change of speed or direction in response to a stimulus. Take away the stimulus and you have change of direction. Tennis needs both. Braking and cutting drills teach your body how to move. Reaction drills add when and which way.
Two different skills
In team sports, planned change of direction and reactive agility keep showing up as separate skills. In Australian football, a reactive agility test told higher-level players from lower-level ones. A sprint test and a planned change of direction test didn't. Be careful how far this goes. The studies are small and come from team sports. I haven't found one that tests this in padel, or directly in tennis.
Does strength help?
Strength and power help you change direction. They look much less useful for reaction. In 24 Australian football players, strength, power, reactive strength and sprint speed explained about 57% of planned change of direction speed, but only about 14% of defensive agility, and that link wasn't statistically significant. In 12 elite female basketball players, strength tracked planned change of direction but not agility.
Strength isn't useless. One small study linked drop jump height to agility. But I don't know of a study showing that strength training alone makes you react faster. Don't count on the gym to fix a late first step.
Reading the opponent
In tennis the cue starts before the ball is hit. Experienced players read the serve motion and predict direction better than novices. Can you train that? A little. Junior players who practised predicting serve direction from video improved, but the gain was gone 32 days later. It's one small study, so I'd call it an early sign.
The split step
The split step is the small hop you take as your opponent hits. In a simulated tennis task, 10 collegiate players reached the target about 100 milliseconds sooner with a split step (764 versus 868 ms).
Timing matters. Players who landed well before their usual response time started fast and missed the target on 7.8% of trials. Players who landed close to it missed on 0.8%. On court, world-class players started the split step around the server's racket-ball contact and landed when early ball-flight information was available.
Grade your reaction drills
I grade a reaction drill by when the cue arrives. That's my own grading, not a study's. A drill with no cue is change of direction, which is still useful.
- Simple reaction. You know the direction and not the start time, like the Ball Drop Reaction Sprint.
- Cue before your first step, 2 options. A partner points left or right while you split step. That's the Point-Cue Shuffle Sprint.
- Cue before your first step, 3 or 4 options. Add colours or a shadow forehand, backhand or drop shot. Try the Racket-Cue Reaction Sprint or the Two-Cue Court Reaction.
- Cue while you're already moving. A second call comes as you recover to the middle, like in the Called Court Pattern. It's the hardest level, so use it last.
To progress, add options and let the cue come a little later.
Alone or with a partner
Every drill above has a version for when nobody's with you.
- Wall Feed Reaction. Hit a tennis ball hard at a wall, split step and move to where it comes back. Aim at a corner for three directions.
- Self-Drop Drop-Step. Drop a ball behind you from shoulder height, turn and chase it. You choose the timing, so the reaction part is weaker.
- Random calls. A cue app calls left, right or a colour after a random pause of 1 to 3 seconds. In the Colour-Call Cone Sprint you run to that colour's cone.
A partner beats the ball drop version. People make patterns without noticing, so the partner has to keep it random. These rules help:
- Stand where the player can see you. Say "ready" once and wait until they're set.
- Before the cue, keep your face and body still. Don't look at the side you picked.
- Pick the side at random. One way is to check a clock before each rep. An even second means left and an odd second means right.
- Don't give a cue while the player is in the air or off balance.
- If the player slips, stumbles or says something hurts, stop the drill.
Make every rep count
The trial I'd point to used small games, 15 minutes once or twice a week for 7 weeks, in 25 under-18 Australian football players. Decision time dropped a lot. Change of direction drills didn't help reactive agility. A 2026 meta-analysis of speed and agility training found no significant effect on reactive agility, with low-certainty evidence.
So treat reaction work as a skill. These habits make each rep count:
- Don't guess. Stay balanced with your weight on both feet until the cue comes. If you move before the cue, you trained a guess.
- Time your split step to land as the cue becomes clear, not before.
- Keep your eyes on the cue, meaning the ball or your partner's hand or racket. Don't look at the ground.
- Went the wrong way? Don't twist on a planted foot. Brake over a few steps, then come back.
- Take the full rest so every rep stays fast.
No trial gives a clean dose, so this is my suggestion: 10 to 15 minutes after your warm-up, once or twice a week, while your legs are fresh. A ladder or fixed cone pattern is change of direction, since nothing tells you where to go. Playing live points trains the same read-and-move skill. That's my reading of team sport results.
Based on Sheppard and Young (2006), Young, Dawson and Henry (2015), Young and Rogers (2014), Uzu et al. (2009), Mecheri et al. (2019) and Farrow and Abernethy (2003).