Illinois Agility Test — Course, Norms, Calculator

The Illinois agility test times a fixed course that forces repeated deceleration, turning and reacceleration. Lower is better. Enter your best course time in seconds:

Setting up the course

1. Mark a rectangle 10 m long by 5 m wide, with a cone at each of the four corners. The two cones at one end are the start and finish.
2. Place four cones down the center line, 3.3 m apart, for the weaving section.
3. The athlete lies face down at the start line, hands by the shoulders.
4. On “go,” the clock starts as the athlete rises: sprint 10 m out and around the far cone, back 10 m, weave in and out through the four center cones, then a final out-and-back 10 m before crossing the finish.
5. Run several trials with full rest and record the fastest.

Who the reference table was actually built on

Worth reading before you take a rating personally. The Illinois norms in general circulation are not the product of a scientific society, and they are not a general adult norm. The table’s own publisher attributes it to Physical Education and the Study of Sport (Davis B. et al., 2000) and states the target group: national level 16 to 19 year olds.

Rating	Men (seconds)	Women (seconds)
Excellent	under 15.2	under 17.0
Above average	15.2 to 16.1	17.0 to 17.9
Average	16.2 to 18.1	18.0 to 21.7
Below average	18.2 to 19.3	21.8 to 23.0
Poor	over 19.3	over 23.0

The table above is the source values. Note that the calculator on this page currently flips from “below average” to “poor” for men at 18.3 seconds rather than 19.3 — if your time falls in that one-second window, trust the table, not the widget.

Two consequences. A recreational adult scoring “average” against nationally competitive teenagers is doing fine. And the women’s “average” band is 3.7 seconds wide against 1.9 for men, which is a sign the table was assembled from field experience rather than from percentiles of a measured distribution — the bands are not equal-probability slices.

How small a difference is real

This is where the test has genuine peer-reviewed backing. Hachana and colleagues studied 105 male team-sport athletes, retesting 89 of them, and reported an intraclass correlation of 0.96 with a standard error of measurement of 0.19 seconds. Crucially, they put the minimal detectable change at 0.52 seconds.

Set that against the table. The gap between “excellent” and “above average” for men is 1.0 second — about two minimal detectable changes, so it is a real distinction. But a 16.4 shading to a 16.1 after a training block is inside the noise, not evidence of progress. Anything under half a second is not a result.

The same study found the test correlates with straight-line speed (r = 0.42) and, before controlling for speed, with leg power (r = −0.39) — but the leg power relationship disappeared once speed was partialled out. Their conclusion: Illinois performance is “significantly related to speed rather than to acceleration and leg power.” Agility tests measure less pure change-of-direction ability than their name implies.

Why lower is better here

Every other event in this battery rewards a bigger number. This one rewards a smaller one, because the quantity is time over a fixed distance. What separates a fast run from a slow one is mostly the turns — braking hard, planting, and getting back to speed — which is why traction and footwear move the score so much.

Pair it with the vertical jump test for vertical power and the beep test for aerobic capacity, or return to the fitness test calculator.

This content is informational and does not replace evaluation by an exercise professional.