Health and well-being: coordination skills
This article is written by Professor Diana Tomasi, Professor of Sport Sciences, for over 30 years, at the G. B. Quadri di Vicenza High School and Head of the middle distance sports disciplines of Atletica Vicentina.
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Last time we talked about the importance of keeping the cardio-circulatory system in good condition.
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On the lifestyle, we can say that training in coordination skills is also important for maintaining a good quality of life. But what are coordination skills? We know that motor skills are divided into two areas, conditional and coordinative skills.
On the other hand they are necessarily interrelated; in other words, all our movements are the expression of motor skills as a whole, and they exploit, so to speak, both our conditional and coordinative skills. Conditional capacities are strength, endurance, speed. They exploit our organic-functional characteristics and are linked to the large systems (cardio-respiratory, muscle, immune, endocrine) of our organism. In addition to being intimately connected to the energy mechanisms that allow us to move.
The coordinative ones are balance, coupling (of movements), eye-manual and eye-breech coordination, rhythm, spatial orientation, reaction time and kinesthetic sense. Coordination skills are related to the efficiency of our nervous system.
Halfway between the characteristics of conditional and coordinative capacities is flexibility (joint mobility).
So training coordination skills means performing exercises to improve our balance, our kinesthetic sense and all the other skills highlighted above.
How’s your balance? Let’s try some tests!
From the standing position, lift your right leg forward so that the thigh and leg proper form an angle of about 90 °. Hold for 30 seconds. Done? It has been difficult?
For many it would not have been.
Do the exercise again, but this time keep your eyes closed, and in the thirty seconds of time, perform some circling of the feet alternately clockwise and counterclockwise (draw circles with the tip of your foot changing direction every three circles …).
Still balanced on one leg, we could introduce paired movements of the arms, lifting them upwards, moving them outwards, forwards, etc. And then by moving one arm forward and the other out, one up and the other forward and so on. Then alternating the support leg.
A little more difficult, isn’t it …
Improving proprioception is also a goal that we could set ourselves (by proprioception, or kinaesthesia, we mean the ability to be aware of our position in space, in relation to the external world and in relation to the various segments of our body). In fact, we have receptors located in the muscles, tendons and muscle sheaths that transmit a series of information and allow us to interact effectively after the reworkings carried out by the nervous system.
Let’s do another exercise! In a fairly empty room, put a sheet of paper two meters away from you. Close your eyes and walk towards the sheet of paper (hold your hands in front of you, as when you walk in the dark …), with the aim of placing your left foot on the sheet. When you have done, open your eyes. Have you reached the goal? If not, how far is your left foot from the sheet of paper?
Now an exercise to be done in pairs, with a ball. Put the ball between you and your partner. Place the ball between your abdomen and that of your partner, supporting it with the pressure exerted by the two bellies. Transport it from point a to point b (about ten meters away) without touching it with your hands and without dropping it. Do the same by placing the ball between your back and back.
Another exercise! Draw a star on the ground using masking tape. Do the exercise you see in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=L49S7VEV9Ho&feature=emb_logo
Even the rope, a tool that we used last time to improve endurance, can actually be very useful also for improving coordination skills. If you don’t have one at home, get a rope (there are various types of rope, plastic with a metal core, leather, and they all cost a few pennies …) but we recommend a very normal rope with two knobs on the ends (which can also be replaced by a sturdy knot if the rope is made from a rope). The length depends on the height of the person. Put the rope under your feet and holding it in both ends (where there are handles) with both hands check that it reaches just under the armpits. If you haven’t jumped the rope for a long time (you will remember that it was a game that many of us have done as children) start very slowly. You will see that little by little you will regain the rhythm and confidence that you had as a child. If you want some ideas on how to jump with the rope in hand, take a look at this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BwHIwCo83M
In the next post we will talk about how to eliminate the so-called “love handles”.
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