Cone Drills and What Actually Builds Agility

Based on Episode 76 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a roundtable between host Joel Smith and movement specialists Shawn Myszka, Scott Salwasser, and Michael Zweifel.

Cone drills are the default currency of speed and agility training: touch this cone, run that pattern, repeat. This roundtable exists because three coaches who work at very different levels, Shawn Myszka with NFL players, Scott Salwasser with college athletes at Texas Tech, and Michael Zweifel with middle school, high school, and small-college athletes, all arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion. Athletes who ace the cones often play slow. The panel digs into why patterned drills fail to transfer, what agility actually is, and what to run instead when you want an athlete who reads the game rather than the floor markings.

Key Takeaways

• Cone drills train one third of the athlete. Salwasser’s athletes were excellent biomechanically but poor perceivers and poor decision makers, so they timed fast and played slow.
• Technique without perception does not transfer. Zweifel points to decades of research: decouple the movement from the perception and you are not doing any good.
• There is no ideal agility technique. Athletes differ anthropometrically and perceive problems differently, so their solutions should differ too.
• Manipulate constraints, do not narrate solutions. Change the space, the rules, and the timing, and the movement you want emerges without you coaching it.
• Make the stimulus human. Humans are free, they carry the information sport actually contains, and every progression should end with one.

Why the cones lie

Salwasser came to this the hard way. He had built himself a reputation as a biomechanics expert, and his athletes tested beautifully.

All my guys moved well, looked good in enclosed circumstances, timed well, good 40 times, good pro agilities, timed fast, and then went out and played slow. And I’m like, what the hell is going on here?

The running back who runs a 4.4 forty and a four-flat pro agility was still getting tackled in the backfield. Salwasser traced it to Myszka’s framework of the three Bs, the behavior (what the athlete perceives), the brain (the decision), and the biomechanics (the action).

We were great at one B. We were great biomechanically. Poor perceivers and poor decision makers.

Zweifel arrived at the same place from the research. He notes that agility already means moving in response to a stimulus, which makes the popular phrase “reactive agility” redundant, and that the literature has been consistent for decades.

When you decouple a movement or an action, so you take away the perception and the intention from the movement outcome, you’re not doing any good. Forty, fifty years of research have pointed toward this: technique without some sort of perception doesn’t work, and it does not transfer to the sport of the athlete.

He also names the field’s quiet embarrassment.

A dirty secret of our field is that we all come from a biomechanics background, but there is no such thing as perfect or ideal agility technique. Everyone is going to be different, because our anthropometrics are different, and we perceive every problem differently.

Myszka frames the underlying principle, borrowing the idea that sport is a problem-solving activity in which movements produce the solution.

We perceive to act and we act to perceive. The two are always connected to each other. We perceive the specifying information within the environment that dictates how we’re going to move.

Coaches like cones because coaches like control

Salwasser is blunt about why the cone survives despite the evidence.

Most coaches are control freaks. What we like about controlled drills is that we know exactly what it’s going to look like and exactly what we should say. Everything’s nice and neat.

His first attempt at open training failed for the same reason: he took an authentic environment and closed it by telling both athletes what to do. The fix was realizing that the coach still holds the controls, just at a different level.

Once I realized I don’t have to tell the guys what to do to elicit a certain response, I just change the dynamics of the drill, the organization, the rules, the spacing. You really become sort of a puppet master, and it’s more fulfilling, because you’re guiding them rather than forcing them.

His athletes noticed it themselves: make the workspace bigger and they cover more ground, make it tighter and it feels quicker, all without a single instruction about footwork.

Lights, colored cones, and the human stimulus

Asked about flashing-light systems, the panel splits usefully. Zweifel is the most permissive, with limits.

A $4,000 price tag for a flashing light system, I can never vouch for that. Colored cones or numbered cones, where there’s a little bit of cognitive demand, I do think there’s a time and place. But I use it as a bridge, and I always try to end with some sort of human stimulus.

Salwasser’s alternative is cheaper and closer to the game.

Humans are free. I’ve got 100 of them out there. So rather than a blinking light or a cone that says one, two, or three, it’s a human. Nobody points and tells you where to go on the field. I just lean, or get on their heels, and that dictates the response.

Myszka objects on information grounds. A light tells an athlete where to go; it does not carry the information sport carries.

A flashing light doesn’t afford and constrain and invite certain movement solutions. It tells us go to red or go to blue. These lights don’t give us any information about space and time that’s going to resemble what happens in the representative environment.

Zweifel adds that even ball sports are ultimately human-read: get rackets and balls into a small-sided game and athletes still have to perceive hip, shoulder, and foot position. Salwasser makes the same point about tennis and baseball, where perception starts with the opponent’s body, not the ball.

What they actually run

The panel’s practical answers all share one shape: the same premise, never the same repetition. Salwasser runs a cat-and-mouse format with an aggressor and an evader, then varies everything around it, the angles, starting positions, workspace, and rules, so no rep repeats. He is particular about one detail.

I don’t want you lunging and reaching, throwing yourself at them as soon as you get near your opponent. I want you running up to them. Shawn called it the bubble: get inside their bubble.

Zweifel’s goal-line game puts an offensive player with a ball against a defender, with two pylons five to eight yards out, obstacles on each side, and four seconds to score. Every rep he moves the pylons, changes the time, or shifts the obstacles, so one side becomes the easy read and the defender has to decide whether to force the play there. Then he coaches with questions rather than corrections, asking each player what they were thinking.

Myszka’s version, built with Everson Griffen of the Minnesota Vikings over years, is the same logic at the elite end. On one play he describes, Griffen shed a block and matched his spacing to a faster back rather than charging, because he was reading the right information.

He focused in on the hip, and when he saw him hesitate in his gait, he matched his movement solution to that problem. He wasn’t focusing on the shoulder or the head, or any feints or fakes.

Underneath all three sits Bernstein’s phrase, and Myszka’s insistence that the coach’s control lives in the problem, not the answer.

The thing you’re in control of is the problem, and you’re in control of the problem through constant constraint manipulation. Repetition without repetition is the umbrella, and underneath that, it depends.

He is equally clear about what that makes the coach, and what it costs.

Perfect practice is constant problem solving, adjusting your solution in response to what the problem gives you. You still get to be a puppeteer, but now you’re a facilitator rather than a coach. My athletes have to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and they have to realize mistakes are going to be present.

Frequently asked questions

Do cone drills actually work?
Not for building game agility, according to this panel. Cone drills train biomechanics with the perception stripped out, so the technique an athlete shows in a closed pattern does not reliably appear in a game. Salwasser’s athletes posted excellent pro-agility and forty times and still played slow, which he traced to poor perception and decision making rather than poor mechanics.

What is agility, exactly?
The accepted definition is movement in response to a stimulus, which is why Zweifel points out that “reactive agility” is redundant. If there is no perception and no decision in the task, it is a movement pattern rehearsal, not agility.

Is there any place for cones or lights?
Zweifel uses colored or numbered cones as a bridge for younger athletes, because they add a simple perceptual and cognitive demand, but he always finishes with a human stimulus. He will not pay thousands for a flashing-light system, and Myszka argues lights carry no real information about space and time. The failure mode is treating the bridge as the destination.

What should you run instead of cone drills?
Human-based games with manipulated constraints: Salwasser’s cat-and-mouse chase where angles, spacing, and rules change every rep; Zweifel’s goal-line game with moving pylons, obstacles, and a four-second limit; and small-sided games with balls or rackets so athletes must read hips, shoulders, and feet.

How do you coach an open drill without controlling it?
You manipulate constraints instead of narrating solutions. Change the workspace, the rules, the timing, and the starting positions, and the movement you want emerges. Both Salwasser and Zweifel then coach with open questions, asking athletes what they saw and what they were thinking, rather than telling them where to put their feet.

About the authors

Shawn Myszka is a sport movement skill acquisition coach and personal performance advisor to National Football League players, a role he has held for about a decade while advising roughly 85 NFL athletes. He writes the football movement blog Football Beyond the Stats and runs the movement-skill content site Movement Mastery.

Scott Salwasser is the Director of Speed and Power Development at Texas Tech University and was the very first guest on the Just Fly Performance Podcast. He previously worked at the University of California alongside Joel Smith, as well as Sparta Performance Science, Louisiana-Lafayette, Sacramento State, and the Oakland Raiders.

Michael Zweifel is the owner of Building Better Athletes and coaches several college teams. He works largely with middle school and high school athletes along with Division III and NAIA college athletes, and writes on agility, game speed, and reactive movement.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full roundtable on Just Fly Sports.