Re the movement efficiency posts by acole and FP .. would it help if i ran thru a ladders drill and a medball sequence and put up a video on instagram? Cos i know it will look horrid as im a big slow lumbering dude who has no movement efficiency but im also very skeptical about being able to change that by doing ladders. I think it's more of a test than a builder. which is my default position for things i dont fancy doing 
I agree for the most part about ladders being a good test for a developed adult. For young kids i'm sure ladders themselves provide more benefit: exposing children to all kinds of intense movements & teaching them how to progress, gets ingrained into their nervous systems. As adults, not so much.
As an adult, getting really good at agility ladders will probably just make you better at ladders, I doubt you'd get much transfer to a sport from it. However, ladders themselves are probably a great warmup. Just like how jump rope is a good warmup - if you can't jump rope like normal, you're still not "awake yet", so slowly working it in and getting your nervous system firing w/ a good feedback mechanism (like the rope itself), is a great way to tell if you are ready to start more intense training. Seems somewhat similar for ladders, it can give you some good feedback whilst not taxing you at all.
IMHO, one of the best ways to improve footwork/agility in sport is to improve overall conditioning and play more sport/practice sport specific drills. Improving fitness is paramount because if you can stay fresher longer, need less time to recover between efforts, give more effort without dying, and last longer, it'll help keep the "domino effect going" & allow you to improve the quality of your movements per session.
A good analogy is boxing (since we're talking about it alot lately). If one gets tired after 3 rounds on the heavy bag (3 minute rounds, 1 minute rest), but your session is 8 rounds, you're going to have reduced quality for 5 rounds. Improved fitness considerably + improved recovery time = more quality rounds on the bag. Once one then hits 8 quality rounds on the bag, they can then start focusing on more advanced work/rest related ratios, like throwing more punches per round in some sessions, throwing less but more intensity, throwing more with more intensity, etc.
All of this has fitness/conditioning at it's base, because if that suffers, one isn't going to be able to hold up their hands properly during/after a punch - ie throwing a hard punch but also protecting yourself when you throw it. If you're too tired to protect yourself when throwing a punch, all of those reps add up and ingrain those faulty motor patterns, leaving one more vulnerable in an actual bout. So similar to "footwork" and such, someone looking in from the outside could just think this athlete "doesn't have it" as compared to a more elite boxer, when instead it could be attributed to mastery of core fundamentals in combination with better overall conditioning & attention to those details.So improving fitness to allow for more intense/better quality training sessions/competition seems to be the desired "loop" that feeds into itself, IMHO.
dno just some quick thoughts & some rambling.
pC!!
