Which skill related component of fitness is related to your ability to use or move two body parts at once?

The five health related fitness components: flexibility, cardiorespiratory endurance, and body composition.

The six skill related components of fitness: agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed.

Click through this Slide Share Presentation a presentation for a better understanding of the health and skill related fitness components. There are 11 total: 5 are considered health-related fitness components and 6 skill related fitness components.

HEALTH RELATED COMPONENTS OF FITNESS

Skill Related Components of Fitness

Is the ability to change the position of your body and to control the movement of your whole body. Agility is an important quality in many sports, because you must change direction rapidly and always have your body under control.

Is the ability to keep an upright posture while either standing still or moving. Good balance in essential in many activities like skating, surfing, skiing, and gymnastics.

Is the ability to perform with strength at a rapid pace. Strength and speed are both involved in power. Football players, swimmers, shot-putters, discus throwers, and high jumpers are examples of athletes who typically have a high degree of power.

Is the amount of time it takes to start a movement once your senses signal the need to move. People with good reaction time can usually start quickly in track and swimming or react quickly in ping pong or karate.

Is the integration of eye, hand, and foot movements. This component is necessary for success in such sports as baseball, softball, tennis, golf, and basketball.

Is the ability to cover a distance in a short amount of time. Speed is a very important factor in many sports and activities. Short runs are used to evaluate speed.

The six skill-related components of fitness contribute to your ability to successfully participate in sports and activities. Those that have a high level of skill-related fitness are more likely to be physically active than those who have lower level of skill. To improve levels of fitness one must first know their level of fitness, and set goals and work toward improving both their health and skill related fitness components. Quote: "If it is to be it us up to me." Essential Understanding: If you are going to bring about change in the way you look and feel it is up to you. No one else can choose the right foods or exercise your body for you!

Fitness Components List

• Body Composition — refers primarily to the distribution of muscle and fat in the body. Body size such as height, lengths and girths are also grouped under this component.
• Muscular Strength — the ability to carry out work against a resistance.
• Muscular Endurance — the ability to repeat a series of muscle contractions without fatiguing.
• Power — the ability to exert a maximal force in as short a time as possible, as in accelerating, jumping and throwing implements.
• Speed / Quickness — the ability to move quickly across the ground or move limbs rapidly to grab or throw.

• Agility — the ability to quickly change body position or direction of the body.
• Flexibility — the capacity of a joint to move through its full range of motion, which is important for execution of the techniques of sports.
• Balance and Coordination — the ability to stay upright or stay in control of body movement, an important component of many sports skills.
• Cardiovascular Endurance — or aerobic fitness, stamina, is the ability to exercise continuously for extended periods without tiring.
• Motor Skill — gross motor skills are the basic skills developed when young, which can be developed upon with specific sports skills training.

While we may refer generally to ourselves or someone else as fit, there are many components of fitness. It’s a general term that lacks the specificity you might need to improve in your particular sport or athletic discipline.

For example, the exercise physiologist Tom Cowan (opens in new tab) notes the need for those playing the same sport, but in different positions, to have various components of fitness in very different degrees. 

“Speed may be a key requirement for a striker in soccer but not so important for a goalkeeper,” says Cowan. “Agility may have a more determining role in the ‘keeper’s level of performance.” Training plans with efficient full body movements (hello best rowing machines (opens in new tab)) are great foundations, but when we’re considering the components of fitness the need for specificity comes into play.

“It is important that we don’t focus on just one of these areas but instead try to improve our fitness holistically, thinking about training to improve each of these areas. Training programmes should incorporate training for the different components of fitness as they have different benefits for the body,” says Cowan.

In the following article, we’ll explore these benefits, along with explanations as to what the different components of fitness are and breaking them up into their two main categories along the way: health-related and skills-related components.

“Cardiovascular endurance can be described as the body’s ability to transport oxygen during sustained exercise,” says Cowan. It’s best shown through an individual’s VO2 Max, the maximum volume of oxygen you can take in, transport in your blood and utilize in your muscles. 

Any exercise that increases your heart rate will test and improve your cardiovascular endurance, including running, rowing, HIIT workouts and cycling. Marathon runners are what immediately comes to mind when thinking about cardiovascular endurance, but Cowan actually points to cross-country skiers as the best example.

“Cross-country skiers typically have some of the highest VO2max values,” says Cowan. “This can be explained because cross-country skiing requires the contraction of several large muscle groups throughout the body, which places a great demand on the cardiovascular system to supply all of these working muscles with the blood and oxygen that they require to repeatedly contract.

“The large demand on the cardiovascular system acts as a great stimulus for physiological adaptations, which enhance the cardiovascular system and cardiovascular endurance of the individual,” he says.

Building up your cardiovascular endurance can help to reduce the workload placed on your heart, while reducing the risk of developing health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension (opens in new tab) and diabetes. 

There could even be a best time to workout (opens in new tab) to help support cardiovascular training. 

Flexibility

Flexibility is the range of motion in a joint or group of joints, or the ability to move joints effectively through a complete range of motion. Obvious choices for improving your flexibility include yoga, Pilates and gymnastics. 

The main way flexibility is tested is through the sit-and-reach test, in which the individual is sat on the floor, legs stretched out and feet pointed towards the ceiling against a box or table, on which a ruler is sat measuring how far you can reach forward. Increased flexibility can positively impact the two following components – muscular strength and endurance – while increased range of motion is a key component in preventing injuries.

Muscular endurance

“Muscular endurance is the ability of the muscle to perform sustained work,” says Cowan. In other words, it’s being able to repeatedly contract the muscle – like a bicep during a curl for example – for an extended period of time without getting tired.

“Training to improve muscular endurance typically involves performing a resistance exercise for more repetitions at a lesser resistance,” says Cowan. He recommends more than 15 repetitions for each set in order to help the muscle resist fatigue, while keeping your between sets rest time to a minimum.

Muscular strength

In contrast, muscular strength is the muscle’s ability to produce force against a resistance – in other words, how heavy you can go – so to build for this component you’ll want to up the kg while cutting your number of reps.

“By adjusting the volume (repetitions) and intensity (resistance/weight) used in a resistance exercise you can target the training to stimulate an improvement in muscular endurance or in muscular strength,” says Cowan. “For muscular strength training, rest periods should be longer between sets to allow the muscle adequate time to recover to be able to produce forceful contractions in the next set.”

Body Composition

Body composition is the distribution of muscle and fat in the body, and is most commonly measured via your body fat percentage. Athletes tend to have a lower body fat percentage than people who are physically fit because having less fat improves their athletic performance. For example, a gymnast would need a lean body composition to hurl themselves through the air.

Want to get an insight into your own body composition? Read up on how body fat is calculated first. 

Agility

The definition of agility is a contentious one. A 2005 review in the Journal of Sports Sciences (opens in new tab) provided one that has drawn a consensus around it, defining agility as “a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus.”

That stimulus could be a shot at a soccer goal, for example, where a goalkeeper needs to be agile in order to react and move his body into a position to keep the ball out of the net. Agility is a skill that is important in a lot of sports, and as such agility training is an important part of an elite athletes training plan. Plyometric box jumps, shuttle runs and cone weaves are all movements that can help build agility.

The Illinois Agility Test (opens in new tab)is arguably the most well-recognised test for assessing agility. And sees the individual start the course lying face down by the first cone, before running and weaving through a series of cones in a set order till they hit the finish line.

Balance

Balance is a component of fitness that relates to your ability to stay in control of your body position. Balance can take on dynamic and static forms. The latter might be holding a handstand in yoga for example, while the former can refer to something like walking or running, or a more complex form, such as managing to keep moving after being tackled.

Balance is important in sport, and in everyday life. “Balance training can help to reduce your risk of falls,” says Cowan, “which may be particularly important for older adults.”

Coordination

Coordination is the ability to use two or more body parts together. It’s all about selecting the right muscle, at the right time, with the necessary intensity to successfully complete the action. Coordination is especially important in sports that require you to hit a ball, like cricket, tennis, and golf. 

Our own coordination comes down to how effective our motor skills are, which can be broken up into fine or gross. Fine motor skills are about our coordination in relation to small movements, like a snooker shot, and the ease they are performed, while gross motor skills involve large movements and muscle groups.

Power (And Speed)

Power is the ability to apply maximum force as quickly as possible. The two components of power are strength and speed (which by itself counts as a component of fitness), and power can essentially be thought of as strength at speed.

For many sports power is required more than strength or speed on its own, but power alone will not directly result in good performance (this stands true for every component of fitness). The perfect example of power on the gym floor is in an Olympic lift like the snatch where the lifter has to move a heavy barbell stacked with weights quickly.

Reaction time

And finally, we come to reaction time: how long it takes you to respond to a stimulus, like a boxer's ability to react to a punch. It relates heavily to your mind-body connection, with your eyes seeing the stimulus, your mind then interpreting, and your body reacting in accordance with that interpretation. Experience plays a big part in reaction time, as you develop the knowledge that then enables you to react more quickly and accurately to the stimulus.