Now, we are going to examine each of the five genetically based foundational motor performance abilities in isolation from each other. Endurance, refers to the ability to perform work of a given intensity over an extended period of time. Three different energy systems provide the athlete with endurance capacity. Two of the energy systems permit the performance of very high intensity work for a short period of time. And one energy system provides energy for low intensity work for a long period of time. All three energy system are critical to the athlete's sport performance potential. And for this reason, we're going to discuss them in considerable detail in lesson eight. Strength refers to how much force the athlete can produce in the absence of any time constraints. An athlete's innate capacity for strength depends on the cross sectional area of their muscle, on the type of fiber making up the muscle, the direction and length of these fibers and nervous system control. Speed is the capacity to move the body and its parts really, really quickly. Speed of movement depends on two high-speed energy systems, and also on the nervous system signaling capacity. Coordination permits the athlete to synchronize two or more body parts, and is the outcome of how well the athlete's brain directs the muscles and joints and limbs to perform various movement units of a skill. And when performing a skill, the body is reshaped within milliseconds. Even the simple act of walking and running demands that the leg muscles contract in different intensities at different times and in different sequences that reshapes the body thousands of times to produce one stride. Coordination involves three brain processes that occur in different paths of the brain, and this makes coordination a really complex ability. And these processes in the brain include sequence initiation, where movement units involved in the skill are stimulated to begin. Then in another part of the brain, the time structure of the entire sequence is established. And the outcome of this is a specific sequence rhythm needed for optimal performance of the skill. In yet another part of the brain, the sequence order for the movement units is established. With practice, the brain forms a picture of what it must accomplish in the order for muscle firing, so the movement units occur in the correct sequence. Now how the brain works to optimally meet the three different tasks of sequence initiation, sequence rhythm, and sequence order has long puzzled motor control researchers. Some athletes are able to learn to initiate a sequence, develop the rhythm and perform the mental representation of the sequence order really quickly. Some require a very long learning phase for these three brain processes to work smoothly. Some athletes are able to reproduced complex movements very precisely when there is no time constriction. However, they can perform the movements at the required speed. And the age of an athlete is indeed a factor here, younger athletes have more difficulty when many movement units are involved in a skill. Coordination improves as the nervous system matures, however, there is also a strong genetic influence in all neural processes, explaining some of the differences among athletes in how quickly and how effectively they will learn how to perform a skill. And flexibility, is the ability to move joints effectively. Optimal flexibility is believed to permit effective use of the other four motor performance abilities. Now together, these five foundational motor performance abilities establish an athlete's total potential physical work capacity. However, for most sports, the training task is not one of maximizing all five foundational motor performance abilities, but rather it is to customize or to configure the athlete's physical work capacity by developing these five abilities in the correct ratio.