If you read my post on agility ladders, I commented on how I recently saw a Vancouver boot camp program doing agility ladder drills with their overweight customers. This is a boot camp that markets itself as a fat-burning exercise program. The idea of having overweight people do agility ladder drills to burn fat is ridiculous.

Anyway, I ranted about it the other night when I wrote that blog post. It felt good getting it off my chest and I figured this was a topic I probably wouldn’t complain about again for a while. Wrong.

So last Thursday night when I arrived at my evening boot camp, one of my customers said she noticed the other Vancouver boot camp program doing agility drills with their customers, and she saw a women have a pretty nasty fall while trying to navigate through a set of agility cones and hurdles the boot camp had setup. This goofy fat-burning agility training workout was taking place on concrete.

I cringe whenever see average men and women doing agility training during a workout designed to produce fat-burning and general fitness. There is absolutely no reason to include those types of drills in a boot camp workout program geared towards burning fat and improved fitness. With average people doing agility training at a fitness boot camp, the risk of injury is high, and agility training is completely pointless for fat loss.

I saw a Vancouver boot camp program using the agility ladder with their customers the other night and it made me sad for all the customers that signed up for the program thinking they were going to burn fat and get in shape, only to have their time and effort flushed down the toilet on a drill that has absolutely no place in a fat-burning exercise program.

The problem with the agility ladder is that unless you’ve got the speed and agility of professional athlete, there’s no way you can navigate through the ladder intensely enough to actually produce any significant fat-burning results. You might as well just play hopscotch with your kid because you’ll be getting about the same amount of cardiovascular workout and fat-burning from playing hopscotch as you would from doing agility ladder drills.

Agility ladders should be used by athletes looking to — wait for it — improve their agility. If you’re looking to burn maximum fat with the most time-efficient workouts possible, avoid the agility ladder at all costs.

If you signed up for a boot camp hoping to lose fat and tone your muscles, and your instructor is incorporating agility training into your workout, you are wasting your time and money on that boot camp program because agility training is not remotely productive towards fat loss.