Key Takeaways
- GAA games are built on short changes of speed. Elite male inter-county footballers averaged about 184 accelerations a match (Malone et al. 2016). One inter-county camogie squad, measured a different way, made 124 accelerations and 83 decelerations a game (Duggan et al. 2025).
- Agility is a reaction, not a pattern. Cutting round a cone you already know about is a different skill from cutting off an opponent you have to read.
- Getting out of the cut is the skill. We’d rather a player who re-accelerates first than one who stops neatly.
- Braking strength is built in the gym. Strength and jump work give the legs the capacity to stop and redirect, so the field work can stay fast.
- Knees need extra care in female players. ACL injuries were 7.8% of LGFA Injury Fund claims but 46.7% of its costs (O’Connor et al. 2023), and neuromuscular training roughly halved ACL injuries in trials with female soccer, basketball, volleyball and handball players (Gu et al. 2025).
Most agility advice for GAA players looks the same: ladders, zig-zag cones and shuttle runs. They’re easy to set up and they look busy. The trouble is that a cone course you’ve already walked asks nothing of your eyes, and a match asks the opposite. Read the player in front of you, then go.
This guide covers 5 things:
- Why agility matters in Gaelic football, hurling and camogie
- What agility is made of
- How we train it
- Knees, and female players in particular
- The common mistakes, and what to do instead
Why is agility important in Gaelic football?
Gaelic football is played in space that keeps changing. Agility is the ability to slow down, change direction and accelerate again in response to the ball and the opponent. It lets a defender stay with a runner and a forward win the half-yard to shoot. Two players with the same straight-line speed can look very different in a game.
The match data shows how often the speed changes. Elite male inter-county footballers averaged about 184 accelerations a match in one study of a county squad (Malone et al. 2016). Most of those are short, so the first few steps after a cut or a turn count for a lot, alongside the top speed a player reaches when the game opens up. In one inter-county camogie squad, players made 124 accelerations and 83 decelerations a game, with midfielders doing the most (Duggan et al. 2025). The full match data for each code is on our GAA by the Numbers page.
What agility is made of
Agility has a few parts, and it helps to know which one a player is short on.
Reading the play. Agility starts with the eyes: where the opponent is, and where the space is opening up. A player who reads the cue a fraction earlier needs less speed to get there. Planned cone drills train the legs and leave this part out.
The plant. When a player cuts, we want the chest turned towards the plant leg and the weight on the leg that’s bent. We don’t want the foot pointing one way and the shoulders turned the other, which usually happens when a player looks up at the play late. It’s the shape we most want to coach out.
The exit. Getting out of the cut is the part that wins the ball. We want the foot steering towards the new direction before it lands, then the legs switching straight into acceleration. We don’t want a stop, a pause and a restart. A cut is only as good as the first steps out of it.
Two kinds of cut. Sometimes a player wants a quick, shallow cut that keeps their speed, like a forward breaking past one defender. Other times they want to sink, slow right down and draw the defender in before breaking the other way. Neither is right on its own. The game decides, so we train both.
Balance, coordination and strength. Every cut puts the body on one leg under load, often with someone leaning on you. Balance and coordination keep the player in control through that moment. Strength lets them brake hard and stay balanced, which means they can approach a cut faster.
How we train agility
A programme for agility is built around 4 things.
- Braking capacity in the gym. We want single-leg strength work and jumps that teach the legs to absorb force and redirect it: lateral hops, lateral bounds, landings that flow into the next movement. We don’t want the pitch to be the only place the legs learn to brake. The gym is where we can load it safely and build it up. Players new to jumping hold the landing for a moment at first, then progress to bouncing straight out.
- A little planned change of direction, early. We want a few planned cuts at the start of the speed work, each one exiting straight into a sprint. We don’t want freeze-and-hold drills where the player stops on the whistle. A match rarely asks a player to stop and stand still.
- Most of the time on reacting. We want drills where the player responds to something: a partner, a ball, a call, a gap. People as targets rather than cones, so the eyes stay up. We don’t want long cone courses the player has memorised. They look good but carry over little to a match.
- Fresh, short and varied. We want agility work early in the session, while the legs are fresh, with plenty of rest between reps, about a minute for every 10 m of sprinting. We change the start position, the speed going in and the type of cut, so no two reps are quite the same. We don’t want agility tacked onto the end of a hard session, because tired cutting is when technique slips. The hardest cutting work goes 3 or more days before a game, and the day before and after a game stay out of the gym.
There’s no GAA study comparing reactive and planned agility work. This is how we coach it, and the reasoning above is why.
One drill we like for a group of four. Two players stand as gates a few metres apart. An attacker starts on one knee and a defender starts facing away. On the call, the attacker tries to get through a gate before the defender can touch them, with a three to six second limit. Then change one thing: where they start, the size of the space, the touch rule. It’s simple and competitive, and it trains reading and exiting together.
Training on your own. Most of our players train alone, so the reading and reacting mostly comes from team training. On your own, the useful work is starts and exits: lateral starts from half-kneeling, hard starts where the first step steers into a new direction, and curved sprints where you look in and out as you run.
For the straight-line side, our GAA speed training guide covers acceleration and top speed, and the plyometric guide covers the jumps.
An example session
This is an example of where agility sits in a gym session, not a prescription. It comes straight after prep, while the legs are fresh.
| Part | What | Dose |
|---|---|---|
| Prep | Adductor mobility, split-stance hold, half-kneeling lateral box jump | 5 to 10 min |
| Speed | Half-kneeling lateral start into 10 m | 3 each side |
| Agility | Hip-turn start into a curved sprint, looking in and out (in a group: the gate drill above) | 4 each way, about a minute’s rest |
| Power | Lateral bound, bouncing straight into the next | 3 x 4 each side |
| Strength | Rear-foot elevated split squat | 3 x 6 each leg |
| Accessory | Copenhagen plank | 3 x 20 s each side |
| Close | Isometric lunge and straight-leg hold | 2 to 3 min |
Knees, and female players in particular
Cutting and landing put a lot of load through the knee, and female players carry a higher risk of ACL injury. In ladies football, ACL injuries made up 7.8% of the LGFA Injury Fund’s claims but 46.7% of its costs over nine years (O’Connor et al. 2023). Prevention work helps. A 2025 meta-analysis of 11 trials in female soccer, basketball, volleyball and handball players aged 12 to 25 found that neuromuscular training (strength, balance, jumping and landing, agility, running mechanics) roughly halved ACL injuries, and knee injuries fell most when players did at least three quarters of the sessions (Gu et al. 2025). No GAA trial has tested it yet, but the movements are the same ones our games ask for. For female players we put landing, braking and change-of-direction strength into the base of every programme. Our camogie strength training guide goes into more detail.
The common mistakes, and what to do instead
- Ladders as the agility session. Fast feet on a ladder look like agility, but there’s nothing to read and no real change of speed. A few minutes in a team warm-up is fine if players enjoy it. It isn’t the agility work.
- Stopping instead of exiting. Drills that finish with a freeze teach the stop. Finish the rep by accelerating away.
- The same rep every time. Repeating one cut builds a pattern, not a skill. Change one thing each rep.
- Skipping the strength work. Without braking strength, players tend to slow down early before a cut, which gives the defender time.
Through the season the balance shifts. Pre-season is where we build the braking strength and the cutting skill, and we keep it topped up in-season, especially for female players. Once the games start, the dose drops, the planned cuts move into the short speed block after the warm-up, and most of the reading and reacting comes from team training. Our pre-season guide shows how that block is put together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is agility important in hurling?
The sliotar moves faster than anyone can run, so first reaction and body position matter as much as top speed. Agility lets a hurler adjust their feet to strike off either side, turn to win a breaking ball and stay balanced through contact. In our experience, a lot of hurling contests come down to who brakes and gets going again first.
Why is agility important in camogie?
The demands mirror hurling, with a fast ball in tight spaces and constant changes of direction. Cutting cleanly gets a player into position without wasted steps and goes easier on the knees and ankles.
What’s the difference between speed and agility?
Speed is how fast you move in a straight line. Agility is how well you change direction in response to what’s happening around you. A GAA match gives you some long sprints and a lot of short bursts and cuts, so both qualities matter, and they’re trained a bit differently.
Why are balance and coordination important in Gaelic football?
Most cuts and catches happen with the body on one leg or off balance, often with someone leaning on you. Balance and coordination let a player stay in control through those moments, so they can brake, turn and go again without losing time or putting a joint in a poor position. Single-leg strength and jump work build both.
Why is reaction time important in Gaelic football?
Most actions in a game are responses to the ball or to an opponent. A player who reads the cue earlier needs less speed to get there. Reaction improves with drills that have something to react to, which is why we spend most agility time on partner and ball drills rather than set cone patterns.
Want agility built into your programme?
If you’d like agility, speed and strength planned around your club training and your season, have a look at Elite Programming. Coaching a squad? See our team programmes.
References
- Duggan JD, Byrne PJ, Malone S, Cooper SM, Moody J. High-intensity accelerations and decelerations during intercounty camogie match play. Sports Health. 2025;17(1):66-79. doi:10.1177/19417381241276016
- Gu J, Zhang R, Zhang Y, Shaharudin S. Neuromuscular training for preventing knee injuries in female team athletes: a meta-analysis. Annals of Medicine. 2025;57(1):2581891. doi:10.1080/07853890.2025.2581891
- Malone S, Solan B, Collins KD, Doran DA. Positional match running performance in elite Gaelic football. J Strength Cond Res. 2016;30(8):2292-2298. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000001309
- O’Connor S, Whyte E, Fortington L, Corrigan J. The cost of injury in Ladies Gaelic football: a nine-year analysis (2012-2020) of the LGFA’s Injury Fund. J Sci Med Sport. 2023;26(1):31-36. doi:10.1016/j.jsams.2022.10.007
