Flexibility and Sports Performance..: Exploring the Relationship between Flexibility and Sports Performance

Abstract

Flexibility as the quantity of movement, because this is a good reminder that it tells us nothing about the quality of the movement. The quality is defined by other factors such as speed, strength, power, or control. For most functional purposes, quality of movement is far more important. . If you watch football, soccer, tennis, or basketball, you rarely see unusual displays of flexibility. You can prove this for yourself by looking through pictures of athletes in action. You can probably mimic almost all the joint positions displayed in the pictures. Of course you probably cannot move into these positions quickly, powerfully, smoothly, painlessly, accurately, and with the coordinated activity of other joints. But these deficiencies usually have nothing to do with range of motion. These are issues of strength, power, mobility, or coordination, not flexibility.