What component refers to the move quickly and easily?

As well as the traditional components of health-related fitness, the term fitness can be broken down into skill components. These are important in performing the more technical aspects of many sport and include speed, reaction time, agility, balance, coordination, and power.

Speed

Most sports and activities require some form of speed. Even long-distance running often requires a burst of speed to finish the race ahead of your competitors. Speed is defined as the ability to move a body part quickly. Speed is not always about how quickly you can move your whole body from A to B. It also relates to body parts. For example, when playing golf, the speed of your arms and upper body in creating the swing are vital in driving the ball over a long distance.

Reaction Time

Reaction time is how quickly your brain can respond to a stimulus and initiate a response. This is important in most sports. The most obvious being responding to the gun at the start of a race, but also a goalkeeper saving a penalty, or a badminton player reacting to a smash shot. The examples in sport are endless!

Agility

Being agile is all about being able to change your direction and the speed at which you are travelling, quickly and efficiently. This is common in sports such as football and rugby where the player with the ball dodges a defender, or in badminton or tennis, moving around the court quickly to reach the shuttlecock/ball in time.

Balance

Balance is the ability to maintain equilibrium whilst stationary or moving. Balance whilst moving is often called dynamic balance. Balance is important in all kinds of sporting situations, most notably in gymnastics and ballet but also contact sports where having good balance may prevent you from being tackled to the floor! Balance is linked to agility, as in order to quickly and efficiently change direction you must be balanced.

Coordination

Coordination is the ability to use the body parts and senses together to produce smooth efficient movements. We have all seen someone who is uncoordinated, their movement looks awkward and shaky. Being co-ordinated is vital in all sports, for example, hand-eye coordination in racket sports and the coordination to use the opposite arm and leg when sprinting.

Power

Power is the product of strength and speed. When we perform a task as quickly and as forcefully as we can, the result is powerful. For example, a sprint start, a shot-put or javelin throw or long-jump.

Ability to quickly change the quantity and direction of body speed

For other uses, see Agility (disambiguation).

Agility or nimbleness is an ability to change the body's position quickly and requires the integration of isolated movement skills using a combination of balance, coordination, speed, reflexes, strength, and endurance. More specifically, it is dependent on:

• Balance – The ability to maintain equilibrium when stationary or moving (i.e. not to fall over) through the coordinated actions of our sensory functions (eyes, ears and the proprioceptive organs in our joints);
• Static balance – The ability to retain the center of mass above the base of support in a stationary position;
• Dynamic balance – The ability to maintain balance with body movement;
• Speed - The ability to move all or part of the body quickly;
• Strength - The ability of a muscle or muscle group to overcome a resistance; and lastly,
• Coordination – The ability to control the movement of the body in co-operation with the body's sensory functions (e.g., in catching a ball [ball, hand, and eye coordination]).

In sports, agility is often defined in terms of an individual sport, due to it being an integration of many components each used differently (specific to all of sorts of different sports). Sheppard and Young (2006) defined agility as a "rapid whole body movement with change of direction or velocity in response to a stimulus".[1]

Agility is also an important attribute in many role playing games, both video games such as Pokémon, and tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Agility may affect the character's ability to evade an enemy's attack or land their own, or pickpocket and pick locks.

In modern-day psychology, author, psychologist, and executive coach Susan David introduces a concept that she terms “emotional agility,” defined as: “being flexible with your thoughts and feelings so that you can respond optimally to everyday situations.”[2][3]

The concept has also been applied to higher education management and leadership, where it was used to accelerate slower traditional and deliberative processes and to replace them with corporate decision-making.[4]

See also

• Illinois agility test
• Agility drill

References

Look up agility in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

1. ^ J. M. Sheppard; W.B. Young (September 2006), "Agility literature review: classifications, training and testing", Journal of Sports Sciences, 24 (9): 919–932, doi:10.1080/02640410500457109, PMID 16882626, S2CID 25145679
2. ^ Dell’Antonia, K. J. (2016-10-04). "Teaching Your Child Emotional Agility". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
3. ^ Orlov, Francoise (2017-05-01). "Book Review. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David". Philosophy of Coaching. 2 (1): 52–54. doi:10.22316/poc/02.1.06.
4. ^ Richard Utz, "Against Adminspeak," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2020.

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In order to prescribe the ideal sets, reps and rests for your clients you must understand the components of fitness these variables relate to. This page provides you with all the clarity you'll need..

A fitness component is simply a way of identifying a certain part of a person’s fitness – essentially you are labelling a subset of changes that you want to occur as a component.  For example, if a client wants to be more flexible I’d work on the ‘flexibility’ component of their fitness.  Or, if a client wants to get stronger to compete in a power lifting event I’d work on the ‘strength’ component of their fitness. 

By having components we can analyse someone’s fitness and then focus on developing an area that will best help them meet their goals.  For example if a basketball player wanted to jump higher then as a trainer I’d look at developing explosive jumping power whilst maintaining the other components of their fitness – for example their aerobic fitness and their flexibility.  Another example may be a client who wants to lose weight, and has significant muscle wastage and low aerobic fitness.  So we might decide to work on the ‘hypertrophy’ and ‘aerobic fitness’ components to rebuild some of the wasted muscle and burn calories at the same time.

The fitness components, their definitions and examples are covered in the following table:

Speed	Description The ability to develop and maintain movement as quickly as possible for short durations
Examples Sprinting 100 metres, jabbing in boxing, getting to a drop shot in tennis, escaping an unpleasant situation as quickly as possible
Power	Description The ability to produce maximal or near maximal force very quickly
Examples Throwing a shot put, a left hook in boxing, serving in tennis, slam dunking in basketball, pushing an offensive personal away
Flexibility	Description The ability to move a muscle/tendon around a set of joints and maintain full range of movement (ROM) at those joints
Examples Doing the splits, being able to turn easily when backing a car, reaching wide and low for a volley in tennis, stretching after a gym session
Balance/Stability	Description The ability to maintain the centre of mass over the base of support
Examples Not drifting during a jump shot in basketball, not falling over after a golf shot, not falling over when doing lunges or squats in the gym
Agility	Description The ability to change the body’s position quickly and precisely
Examples Changing direction while dribbling a soccer ball, side stepping in rugby, swaying to avoid a punch in boxing
Strength	Description Strength is the maximum force a person can exert on a given resistance for a set number of repetitions or set time
Examples Lifting a bed down a set of stairs, carrying six heavy shopping bags in from the car, climbing a rope ladder on an obstacle course, lifting very heavy weights in the gym
Hypertrophy	Description The ability to grow a muscle/group of muscles
Examples Growing total muscle mass in the off-season for a rugby league front rower, building muscle size in the gym, building muscles that have wasted away over time due to a sedentary lifestyle
Muscular endurance	Description The ability to work a particular muscle or muscle group for longer periods at less than maximal effort
Examples A small craft yachtsmen squatting in the boat for long periods, a snow boarder developing leg stamina for boarding, doing as many push ups as you can in a circuit class
Anaerobic fitness	Description The ability to sustain high intensity efforts for as long as possible
Examples A 400 or  800 metre runner, a basketball player during several minutes of continuous play, any form of interval training
Aerobic fitness	Description The ability to sustain exercise for extended periods of time using large amounts of muscle mass in cyclical (repeated) movement at low to moderate intensities
Examples A 10km run, a triathlon, walking a track, cycling an hour home from work

It’s important to realise that fitness components exist on a continuum rather than as distinct areas as depicted in the previous table.  An obvious example of this concerns repetition ranges with resistance training.  Strength training is typically low repetition with very high loads, hypertrophy is typically high load resistance training for intermediate reps, and muscular endurance is typically high reps with lower loads.  Strength training for example doesn’t ‘stop’ as soon as you do more than 6 reps for example, the training just becomes predominantly hypertrophy training.

In the same vein if I went for a long distance jog I’d primarily be training the aerobic fitness component, but while out on the jog I might get chased by an angry dog causing me to increase my speed considerably to avoid getting bitten.  This would mean that for a short period of time I’d predominantly be working the components of speed and/or anaerobic fitness before returning to training the aerobic fitness component as I reduced my speed when the dangerous dog passed.

What we have done in the exercise sciences is to define fitness components and attach training guidelines to each component.  These training guidelines are known simply as the ideal ‘FITT’ (frequency, intensity, time and type) variables that we must manage to affect the component we want to change or maintain. 

The application of the FITT variables for the different fitness components is covered in more depth in the exercise prescription pages at ptdirect.