If I had to choose one among all motor abilities that I would want the young athletes I train to be "blessed" with, it would definitely be coordination.
Why is that? Because if you first get a 14 or 16-year-old athlete "in your hands," using appropriate methods and content, you can provide them with a satisfactory level of strength or endurance in a reasonable time.
However, if that athlete lacks developed coordination, it will take a magic wand to turn them into a top-notch athlete one day. Because it will be very difficult to compensate for what was missed during the sensitive years for coordination development.
And this will likely hinder effective movement on the sports field. Imagine a young tennis player who has to react quickly, run to get the ball that hit the net but still got over, and then perform a perfect shot - if his/-her ability to quickly react, adapt to changing situation and have the sense to hit such a difficult ball was never developed.
If you agree with the above, you probably wonder why coordination training is so rare. Why so little is said or written about coordination training. And if it is discussed, the whole topic is often missed. Honestly, I don't know the answer.
In my integral conditioning training, I always included various exercises to develop coordination. Starting with warm-ups: high knee carioca, dead leg run, lateral skips, jogging with one foot stepping sideways on count of three, single leg bent knee with arm reaches... Continuing with exercises for speed development: various movement patterns using agility ladders or markers (in such exercises, the emphasis at the beginning should be on coordination development. Only when young athletes adopt the given movement patterns does real speed training begin...). Ending with various games: Cannonball shooting. The ball is the target. Rob the nest.
For me, it has always been natural to work on developing coordination in every training session. To build the foundation for sport-specific movements or skills.
That's why this article about the importance of coordination development is one of the first appearing on the Mozaiq Sports website. That's why in the book "Formula for Success in Sports 2," I placed a strong emphasis on coordination training. In addition to explaining the importance of coordination in sports development and defining coordination abilities, chapters on planing coordination training according to stages of sports development and basic principles of coordination training are accompanied by numerous exercises and games for development of:
and sport-specific coordination (examples for basketball, handball, soccer, tennis).
Honestly, I often see coaches pushing sports-specific drills throughout the entire training, losing patience without understanding why young athletes can't perform as expected...
Without realizing that the reason is that the same young athletes lack certain foundations. And that if these young athletes can't move and react without equipment (balls, rackets, hockey sticks,...), they certainly will not be able to move effectively on the sport field with that same equipment in their hands, surrounded by opponents and coach yelling instructions on the side line.
Would you ever expect 8th-grade students to start solving differential equations in school? Probably not. Pre-algebra helping him/-her to prepare for high-school algebra would be more common.
Do not skip the foundations.
If you don't develop them in the sensitive period, a young athlete will never reach their sports potential.
Nor fulfill his/-her sports dream...
Various names are used for coordination, so for my lecture on the subject of coordination at the annual international UKTH conference, before many years, I coined one - the "queen of motor abilities."
Who is your Queen?
- Igor Macner
