Exercises to improve coordination skills
Exercises to train coordinative skills are often found in school with children. To train the ability to react, games such as chain catching, shadow running and ribbon catching can be used. This aspect is particularly evident in shadow running.
One athlete runs in front and a second one tries to imitate all the movements of the athlete in front identically. So he has to watch exactly what the athlete in front is doing and then react as fast as lightning. An exercise for the rhythmic ability can be the run over banana boxes or rings on the floor.
These crate rings are designed in such a way that they come closer or further apart as the distance increases. This automatically brings you into a changing rhythm. Even if the distances remain the same, you will get a rhythm in your approach because of the distances themselves.
A simple exercise for the kinaesthetic ability to differentiate is throwing at small targets such as cans or areas of a goal that are hung with ribbons. Just like playing darts, it is a matter of aiming precisely and adjusting one’s movements accordingly. The forward and backward roll is a very good exercise for training the ability to orientate, since the body is not perfectly oriented for a short time due to the overhead effect.
Even under water with closed eyes we can train our sense of orientation very well, because the body perceives gravity much less than outside the water. Therefore, we can train our orientation ability well under water. The ability to balance can be exercised and trained almost everywhere in everyday life.
You can wait at the traffic light on one leg for the light to turn green.You can also get aids like slackline or Indo-Board and do different balance exercises with them. The ability to adapt is trained in almost all games and sports, as new situations always arise during play, to which the players and athletes have to adapt and therefore change their movement patterns. For the coupling ability it is important that arm, leg and trunk movements are coordinated or combined.
A very simple exercise that everyone should have tried is the jumping jack. There it is about training the interplay of arms, legs and trunk. However, you can also introduce variations in the sequences of movements by replacing or changing opposite movements, working with parallelism or changing the speed.
If you want to bring in more variation, you can move away from the classic foot movement of the jumping jack and make long jumps forward and backward. There are many variation possibilities in this exercise, which differ in complexity and intensity. The exercises for the coordinative abilities presented here are only a small part of the large repertoire of exercises and movement possibilities. Especially for beginners and not so experienced athletes the exercises from school and club are worthwhile, because they train the basics very well and you can change the degree of difficulty by your own variations.
