The ability to rhythmize is the ability to adapt one’s own movement rhythm to a given rhythm. This coordinative ability is particularly relevant to sports medicine. It can be damaged by central nervous inflammation, hemorrhage, injury, or space-occupying lesions.
What is the ability to rhythmize?
Rhythmization ability is the ability to adapt one’s own movement rhythm to a given rhythm. This coordinative ability is particularly relevant to sports medicine. Sports medicine specialists understand rhythmization ability to be one of a total of seven coordinative abilities. Together with the coupling ability, the changeover ability, the differentiation ability and the balance ability as well as the orientation ability and the reaction ability, the rhythmization ability enables a perfect interaction between the nervous system and the musculature. This perfect interaction is very helpful in everyday life and essential for athletic challenges. A person capable of rhythmization perceives a given rhythm of movement, recognizes it and adapts his own movements to this rhythm. This adaptation of one’s own movements to a given rhythm plays an increased role for many sports, such as dance, but also ball sports. In the end, however, hardly any movement is possible without the ability to adapt to a given rhythm – even outside of sports. Training sessions for various sports have for some time often focused on training the ability to rhythmize.
Function and task
The coordinative abilities of humans enable the harmonious interaction between the sensory organs, the central nervous system and the muscles. Coordination makes targeted movements or targeted sequences of movements from individual movement components thus possible in the first place. Intermuscular coordination refers to the coordinated interaction of several muscles. This must be distinguished from intramuscular coordination, which describes the interaction of nerves and muscle fibers in a single muscle. In addition to the flow of movement, the speed of movement and the precision of movement, the rhythm of movement gives an indication of a person’s coordination ability. Together with the conditional skills of strength, endurance and speed, the coordinative skills form the sport motor skills. Sporting movement sequences are more complex than everyday movement sequences. They usually consist of significantly more, more precisely coordinated individual movements and generally require a maximum of inter- and intramuscular coordination. Thus, a person’s coordinative abilities primarily determined whether a person is capable of learning sports techniques and skills at all and how good he or she will be at those techniques and skills. As a part of the coordinative abilities, the rhythmic ability also has these characteristics. Coordination of senses and muscles is one of the most important components for rhythmization ability. A good soccer player, for example, perceives the speed of a ball through the interaction of his senses, through air sounds and visual impressions. He is aware of his own spatial position and his own position in relation to the ball through impressions of the muscular sense and the sense of balance. He then tunes his movements precisely to the externally perceived rhythm in order to achieve a certain goal. The ability to rhythmize also plays a role for a dancer. He perceives the rhythm of the music auditorily. Visually, he recognizes the movement rhythm of his dance partner. He adjusts his own movement rhythm to these two rhythms. The ability to rhythmize thus ensures the rhythmic design of one’s own movement actions and enables the meaningful division of movement through accentuation. Although rhythmization requirements vary with the sport, those of another sport are usually easier to learn for a trained professional than for an athletically inactive person.
Diseases and ailments
Coordinative abilities, and therefore rhythmization abilities, are not equally developed in every person. To a certain extent, rhythmization ability is indeed tied to the smooth functioning of anatomical structures such as the central nervous system and the sensory system.However, the majority of all coordinative abilities are acquired through practice rather than innate. This makes the ability to rhythmize a learned and thus trainable skill. Senses can be sharpened, for example. This is especially true for attention related to movement rhythms. A poor ability to rhythmize does not necessarily have to be a disease. For example, if a child is not particularly active and rarely moves, he or she will generally have a poorer rhythmic ability in adulthood than an active child – which is another reason why physical play and romping are beneficial. In the same way, a competitive athlete has a better rhythmization ability than the average. However, this does not make the average person’s ability to rhythmize pathological. Gradual differences are therefore nothing unusual. Nevertheless, damage to the perceptual systems, damage to the central nervous system, or damage to muscle structures can still make the ability to rhythmize difficult or impossible. Strokes, for example, can affect both the perceptual system and the conduction ability of the nerve pathways. If the motor nerve pathways are damaged, the patient’s own movement rhythm can no longer be adapted to an external rhythm, since the commands from the central nervous system reach the muscles only with a delay. Inflammation of the pyramidal and extrapyramidal nerve tracts in the spinal cord can also impair motor abilities and thus limit the ability to rhythmize. The same is true for inflammation in the sensorimotor areas of the brain or cerebellum. Demyelinating diseases also delay the conduction velocity of the nervous system. Diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or ALS can even completely degrade the motor centers of the central nervous system. Tumors and other spatial lesions in the brain or spinal cord may also have an impact on the ability of the nervous system to regulate rhythm. Many neurology examination methods test the patient’s coordinative abilities to assess and localize damage to the central nervous system. Like all coordinative abilities, the ability to rhythmize generally declines with age. This is true even in the absence of central nervous disease.
