If you want to know how to improve change of direction speed, here's the short answer: raise your top speed and teach your body to stay relaxed while it cuts. More cones, ladders and cutting patterns won't do it on their own. If drills were all it took, every academy player doing them would already move like Tyreek Hill. They don't.
Watch: the video this post comes from
What separates the best movers is how fast their nervous system processes and controls the movement. That's the part most athletes never get told.
Tyreek Hill didn't learn his cuts from cones
Before the NFL, Tyreek Hill was a sprinter. In the NFL he's been tracked at around 37 km/h, the fastest ball carrier since the league started measuring.
My read is that his top speed came first. Years of sprinting built a nervous system that fires at a level very few athletes have. So when he did learn to cut off the inside edge of his foot, he already had the coordination and rhythm to build it on. His cuts sat on top of his top speed.
Anything in sport that needs speed, the first step, a cut, a breakaway, is governed by how fast your nervous system can fire. If you want to improve those things, that's what you have to train.
Why your body goes tense in the cut
Your nervous system's first job is to get a movement done, not to do it well. When something feels like a threat, it picks the safest, most controlled option it has.
A game feels like a threat. The pressure, the contact, the crowd, the adrenaline. So a lot of athletes race into the cut and stay tense on the way out, because tense is the option the nervous system trusts.
And tension is expensive. Your upper body sets the rhythm for your lower body. If your shoulders and arms are tight, they stop swinging smoothly, the legs lose their rhythm and your stride frequency drops. Your signals can't turn into movement fast enough, so the defender stays with you. Right?
People think the fix is more power, more strength or more cutting drills. But most of these players already have the power. What they're missing is smoothness: a clean swap between the legs while they're in the air.
What a great cut looks like
Watch Mbappé or Vinícius Júnior change direction and look at it in three parts.
- ✓The approach: shoulders and hands stay relaxed.
- ✓The plant: they don't brace.
- ✓The exit: the first three strides are long and low, and the back leg drives them forward.
Now picture a tense player. The back leg doesn't come through cleanly, so they have to twist themselves across. All the effort goes into the ground, and high effort means high tension. In rugby league or AFL you see it when a player breaks away, stays up tall in the hips and can't drop into the next step. That usually isn't a strength problem. The nervous system can't put them in that position at that speed and keep them relaxed through it.
How to improve change of direction speed: top speed first
I think of top speed work as a Trojan horse. From the outside it looks like one simple thing: you're just sprinting. Inside it is everything else. Relaxation, rhythm, coordination, and how fast your nervous system processes movement. It carries all of that into your acceleration and your cuts without you ever drilling them directly.
At full speed you can't hold extra tension, because even a tiny bit slows you down straight away. So top speed teaches your body to fire the muscles it needs and switch off the ones it doesn't. That's coordination, and there are two kinds:
- ✓Inside one muscle: how many of its fibres your nervous system switches on, and how fast.
- ✓Between muscles: the right ones firing at the right time, and the opposing ones relaxing so they don't fight the movement.
Top speed demands both. I noticed it in myself. As I did more top speed work, my arms started timing with my legs. My arm went down as my leg went down. With that timing I could load sideways onto the leg and change direction much better. I never practised that in change of direction drills.
Think of it like an engine. Top speed is the red line. Acceleration and change of direction are the lower gears. If the red line is low, every gear runs out of room early. Raise the red line and every gear underneath has far more room. Change of direction drills work on the gear change. Top speed raises the whole engine.
My view is you can't drill your way around a slow nervous system. Drills give you a little adaptation, then it levels off. The nervous system adapts to what stresses it most, and for speed, nothing stresses it like running flat out.
What it looks like with our athletes
Tristan is a good example. As his top speed went up, so did his coordination, and it carried straight into his change of direction. His turn and go test dropped from 1.67 seconds to 1.51 seconds. We didn't drill those cuts into him. Improving his top speed improved the whole system that runs them.
Same with Xavi. When he started with us his top speed was 22.3 km/h. It's now 31.2 km/h. He runs with the ball straight through two defenders, gets more space, more shots and more dribbles per game. Dylan is at 35 km/h. Watch a defender start level with him: by the time Dylan turns, he's gone.
A simple check you can do this week
Time it and film it. The time tells you whether something changed. The film tells you why.
Film one hard cut from side on in slow motion and watch your first three strides out. Are they long and smooth, or short and popping upwards? If they're short and going up, ask why. Are you rushing? Is tension stopping you from staying smooth through the whole stride?
If you're a parent, don't ask how many sessions your athlete has done. Ask what has to change in how they move. In my experience, about 90% of the time the limiting factor comes back to the nervous system, rarely the structure. Find that, fix it first, and everything else moves with it. That's exactly what our biomechanical assessment is for.
And if you're wondering whether the ladder is worth keeping, read do agility ladders and cones make you faster.