General information
The term “coordination” generally refers to the interaction or coordination of individual processes. This can be a temporal coordination of delivery dates of a delivery service provider. In sport, the term is used primarily in the field of movement science.
There, the term coordination, or coordinative skills, is understood as the interaction of muscles and the central nervous system. As an example, a simple handle to a water glass can serve here. The eye sees the glass and sends the information via the central nervous system to the corresponding arm muscles.
The hand now grasps the glass unerringly and picks it up. This is the simplest example of coordination in movement sequences. Coordination is based on the experience of movement.
This means that our brain is able to remember movements and, in the case of a similar movement, to fall back on previously made experiences. It is also assumed that experiences of movement in everyday life are applied to sports movements. In coordination, a distinction is made between intra- and intermuscular coordination.
Intramuscular coordination refers to the interaction of nerve and muscle. This is the nerve that leads from the central nervous system to the individual muscle strands and transmits information from the brain to them. Here the example with the water glass can be taken up again.
Intermuscular coordination refers to the interaction of different muscles. The contracting muscle (muscle that does the work) is the agonist, and the relaxed muscle is the antagonist. For clarification, we will look at the muscles in the upper arm.
On the front side of the upper arm is the biceps muscle, on the back side of the upper arm is the triceps. If we lift the upper arm from a hanging position so that a 90° angle is created in the elbow joint, then the biceps works and becomes the agonist. The triceps acts as an antagonist.
When the arm is lowered back into its original position, the biceps changes from agonist to antagonist, as it no longer performs any work. The triceps is now contracted and working, and therefore changes from antagonist to agonist. This muscular interaction can be observed throughout the body. The coordinative abilities, or coordination, is therefore a performance prerequisite for mastering simple movements in everyday life, but also very complex athletic movements. It is difficult to measure and prove how large the share of coordination is in a sporting performance.