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Agility Dot Drill

How to Improve Foot Speed, Coordination, & Balance

This is a great training drill for improving foot speed for various sports. It's also a fun way to exercise and gain good balance. The idea is to move through the drill as quickly as possible while maintaining reasonable accuracy for hitting the dots. You don't need to be perfect, but try to at least hit the edge of the dots each time. Be sure to practice this before you increase the speed so you don't injure yourself. It may remind you of a demented game of hopscotch.

Essentially this exercise takes you through jumping movements in each direction from each direction using various foot positions. Because it's so thorough you'll most likely find weak areas. For me it's the one-foot on the left side that screws me all up. Work on these areas first to improve your time. Just getting the hang of the drill will also help to speed you up.

Getting Ready

First, set up five dots in this arrangement. They sell special mats for this, but you can just use some pieces of duct tape or trace circles in marker on a rubber mat. They also sell circular rubber dots you can use. Just be sure not to use something that's going to trip you or slide out from under you.

The standard dimensions are approximately two feet square or two feet across by three feet long. You can certainly adjust this based on your height and jumping ability.

There are five rounds:

  1. Two Feet - Front & Back
  2. Right Foot Around
  3. Left Foot Around
  4. Both Feet Around
  5. Two Feet - Front & Turn
The goal is to get the best time possible. Recommendations for times will depend on how many sets of each round you perform. The typical method is to go through each round 5-10 times before moving on to the next. If you're doing 5-6 sets per round, then a good time for an average person would be around 60 seconds. I've been able to do 6 sets for all 5 rounds in under a minute.

The arrows depict the direction of movement starting at the top (A & B) for rounds 1 and 5, and starting at the uppermost left dot (A) for rounds 2-4.

The animation below shows the foot positions for each movement. View the dot drill exercise broken down.