Part 3 - Five components of motor performance

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From the course by University of Florida

The Science of Training Young Athletes

163 ratings

University of Florida

The Science of Training Young Athletes

163 ratings

Seventy percent of kids drop out of sports before their high school graduation. Only 15% leave because they feel they are not good enough. Almost 70% leave because they were not having fun, or due to problems with the coach. Injuries cause 30% to give up sports. This course is packed full of practical sports science information that provide youth coaches and parents with the practical pediatric sports science insights to successfully retain young athletes and develop their sport potential while avoiding injury and overtraining. We begin by examining the multidimensional nature of coaching, the relevant sport motor performance abilities, the impact of growth and development on motor skills, the gene versus practice controversy, and briefly overview the body structures strengthened through training. Then we explore the athlete's energy supply, where this energy comes from, and how it matures along with the athlete. Finally, we examine the development of strength, power, anaerobic capacity, coordination and flexibility through the life span. The optional text manual for this course is available at: http://www.learnitez.com/HighPerformanceScience/manuals/

From the lesson

Week 1: Introduction to the young athlete

Youth coaches who have a sound understanding of pediatric sports science are essential to the successful development of a young athlete’s sport potential. In this section you are introduced to the multidimensional nature of coaching, and how an athlete’s motor abilities of endurance, strength, speed, coordination and flexibility are affected by growth and maturation.The optional text manual for this course is available at: http://www.learnitez.com/HighPerformanceScience/manuals/

Part 1 - Introduction to motor performance abilities5:49

Part 2 - Designing physical work capacity5:06

Part 3 - Five components of motor performance5:16

Part 4a - Sport-specific motor abilities2:54

Part 4b - Sport-specific motor abilities2:49

Part 4c - Sport-specific motor abilities4:57

Part 5 - Key points of motor performance abilities3:10

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Chris Brooks
Instructor
Coaching Science Coordinator for USA Track and Field

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.

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