Becoming more athletic means developing several physical qualities at once: power, speed, agility, coordination, reaction time, and balance. You can’t just get stronger or just get faster and call it done. True athleticism is the ability to produce force quickly, change direction on a dime, and do it all while staying balanced and coordinated. The good news is that all of these qualities respond to training, and many of the same exercises improve several at once.
What Athleticism Actually Is
Athleticism sits at the intersection of two fitness categories. The first is health-related fitness: cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition. The second is skill-related fitness: balance, coordination, power, agility, reaction time, and speed. Most people searching for ways to “increase athleticism” are really asking about that second group. They want to jump higher, sprint faster, cut sharper, and move more fluidly.
The foundation underneath all of those skills is force production. How much force you can generate, and how quickly you can generate it, determines your ceiling for nearly every athletic quality. That’s why strength training is the starting point, not an optional add-on.
Build a Strength Base First
In the early stages of any training program, strength gains come primarily from your nervous system learning to use the muscle you already have. Your brain recruits more motor units (the bundles of muscle fibers that fire together), increases their firing rates, and synchronizes them more effectively. These neural adaptations are the fastest route to producing more force, and they happen within the first several weeks of consistent training.
For building raw strength, compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, and rows are the priority. Work in the 3 to 6 rep range at challenging loads. As you get stronger, the key shift is learning to move those loads with intent. Research on something called “maximum intended velocity,” essentially trying to accelerate the weight as fast as possible on every rep, shows it produces greater improvements in how quickly your muscles generate force compared to lifting at a self-selected pace. In practical terms: even when the bar moves slowly because the weight is heavy, your intent to move it fast matters. That mental effort changes the neural signal your muscles receive.
For more experienced athletes, loads around 80% of your one-rep max tend to optimize the rate at which muscles produce force. Less experienced lifters see similar benefits at around 65% of their max. Moderate loads in the 40 to 60% range, lifted with maximum speed, can activate muscles at levels comparable to much heavier weights. This is why power-focused athletes often rotate between heavy days and lighter, faster days in the same training week.
Add Plyometrics for Explosiveness
Plyometric training, which includes box jumps, depth drops, bounding, and various throwing exercises, bridges the gap between gym strength and athletic power. It teaches your muscles and tendons to store and release energy like a spring, which is exactly what happens when you sprint, jump, or change direction in a game.
A meta-analysis of plyometric research found that programs lasting at least 6 to 10 weeks with 18 or more sessions produced consistent improvements. Volume matters: programs with more than 50 jumps per session delivered strong results, and some studies found benefits with 80 or more jumps per session. Most study protocols ranged between 10 and 140 total jumps per session, so there’s a wide effective range depending on your training level and the intensity of the jumps.
Rest between sets typically falls between 30 seconds and 4 minutes, with higher-intensity jumps (like depth jumps from a box) requiring longer recovery. The goal is quality, not fatigue. Each rep should be a maximal effort. If you’re grinding through jumps on tired legs, you’re training endurance, not power.
The payoff is real. Plyometric programs produce average vertical jump improvements of 14 to 29%, and one 12-week study on adolescent athletes showed significant gains in both jump height and 30-meter sprint speed. These aren’t small differences. A 20% jump improvement can be the gap between being average and being the most explosive person on your team.
Train Agility With Reactive Drills
Most people think of agility as running through a cone drill as fast as possible. That’s actually change-of-direction speed, which is a related but separate skill from true reactive agility. Research confirms these are independent abilities that require different training approaches. Pre-planned drills (where you know which way to cut) improve your mechanics and footwork. But in a real game, you’re reacting to a defender, a ball, or a teammate, and that decision-making component changes the physical demand entirely.
To develop agility that transfers to sport, you need drills that include an unpredictable stimulus. Have a training partner point a direction for you to react to. Use a light board or randomly called numbers. Play small-sided games like 1-on-1 or 3-on-3, which force constant reactive decisions under time pressure. These drills train your brain and body together, which is what real athleticism demands.
Pre-planned cone drills still have value for improving your cutting mechanics, deceleration ability, and footwork patterns. Use both. Just don’t assume that getting faster through a planned ladder drill will automatically make you quicker in a game.
Don’t Skip Single-Leg Work
Almost every athletic movement happens on one leg: sprinting, cutting, jumping off one foot, landing. Single-leg (unilateral) exercises activate the stabilizing muscles around the knee and core to a greater degree than two-legged exercises, because the smaller base of support forces your body to work harder to stay balanced.
This has a direct performance benefit. Research shows that unilateral training improves stability during jumping and landing by increasing co-activation of the muscles surrounding the knee, particularly the hamstrings. That co-activation helps absorb landing forces and protects against injury. Single-leg work also improves force transfer through the entire chain from your foot through your hips and trunk, which is how power actually gets expressed in sport.
Bulgarian split squats, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, step-ups, and single-leg box jumps are all staples. Aim to include at least one single-leg strength exercise and one single-leg power exercise in each lower-body session.
Protect Your Tendons With Eccentric Training
Your tendons are the cables that connect muscle to bone, and they play a critical role in storing elastic energy during athletic movements. Stiffer, healthier tendons transmit force more efficiently and are more resistant to injury. Eccentric training, which emphasizes the lowering or lengthening phase of an exercise, is one of the most effective ways to improve tendon health.
High-load eccentric protocols improve collagen turnover, increase tendon stiffness, and promote better structural organization within the tendon itself. Practically, this means controlling the lowering phase of exercises like squats, Nordic hamstring curls, and calf raises with a 3 to 5 second descent. You don’t need a separate “tendon program.” Just emphasize slow, controlled eccentrics in your existing strength work, particularly for the Achilles, patellar, and hamstring tendons, which take the most abuse in explosive sports.
Eat and Sleep Like an Athlete
Protein intake for power and strength athletes should fall between 1.6 and 2.0 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 180-pound (82 kg) person, that’s roughly 130 to 164 grams of protein daily. Spreading that across 3 to 5 meals helps with absorption and keeps muscle protein synthesis elevated throughout the day. Carbohydrates are equally important for explosive athletes because they fuel the high-intensity efforts that drive adaptation. Don’t cut carbs if your goal is to become more athletic.
Sleep is arguably the most underrated performance variable. Athletes who sleep fewer than 8 hours per night are 1.7 times more likely to get injured than those who sleep 8 or more hours. Nearly half of elite athletes fail to reach the recommended 7 to 9 hours, and insufficient sleep directly impairs reaction time, working memory, and the ability to process information quickly. For athletes with heavy training demands, 8 to 10 hours is the target range most consistently linked to reduced injury rates and improved performance. If you’re training hard but sleeping 6 hours, you’re undermining everything you do in the gym.
Putting It All Together
A well-rounded athletic development program hits four training qualities each week: strength, power/plyometrics, agility/reactivity, and single-leg stability. You don’t need separate sessions for each. A typical training day might start with a plyometric exercise (box jumps or broad jumps for 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 5 reps), move into a heavy compound lift, follow with a single-leg strength exercise, and finish with a short reactive agility drill.
Three to four sessions per week is enough for most people. Progress by gradually increasing the intensity of your plyometrics (higher boxes, depth jumps), the load on your strength exercises, and the complexity of your agility drills. Expect noticeable improvements in jump height and sprint speed within 6 to 12 weeks. Strength gains will come faster in the first few months due to neural adaptations, with structural changes in muscle and tendon building over months and years.
The athletes who look effortlessly explosive didn’t get there by accident. They trained force production, speed, reactivity, and stability as distinct but connected qualities, and they gave their bodies enough fuel and rest to actually adapt.