Archive for May 9th, 2009
Sunday
- Joggle
Coordination: The ability to combine several distinct movement patterns into a singular distinct movement. Dynamax. Wikipedia states coordination can be thought of as each physiological process that must be performed in order to achieve movement. These include muscles, limbs and the nervous system. Just like our ipods which we can oprate at a single touch our bodies work the same with even the most simple of movement being made up of a number of complex physiological and neural processes. Who wants to be coordinated?
Everybody should want to become more coordinated as coordination has an overflow effect on a number of other skills. Most people simply consider coordination an attribute in sports, the classic example is hand eye coordination and catching a ball a distinct asset in many sports. Coordination, however, helps in much broader ways than that and in ways which will help us as athletes, since we’re all athletes, to some degree.
Without developing our coordination, through practice, we would not be able to master many of the complicated movements we use in CrossFit. Remember the practical paralysis we used to feel when we were first learning some of the lifts and moves. The classic example is the Clean and Snatch. Remember how easy it looked when you were shown only to feel completely uncoordinated and unsatisfied the moment the bar was placed in your hands. Trying to get that bar to land right on the shoulders without curling it, using only the smallest of weight or a broomstick to get the movement pattern right, was frustrating. It wasn’t until we learned the pattern and coordinated our muscles to fire and work in the correct sequence could we then work on speed, strength and eventually power. Coordination comes about through practice.
With a lot of exercises remember the first time you tried and barely managed, like handstands, but the next few times you got much better at getting up against the wall and much more stable. Practice teaches our bodies coordination. So don’t underestimate the benefit of the practice on rest days of our skills or before or after a WOD when we play around with a skill. Practice makes perfect but remember more importantly perfect practice makes perfect. Practice needs to be perfect to teach the coordination to most effectively master these skills.
