Study regarding the development of agility skills of students aged between 10 and 12 years old

Physical education classes, at primary school level, are based on developing psychomotor skills, out of which the most important are coordination and speed. At this age, skills like coordination, speed or the two combined, namely agility, are developed the best. Agility is an important characteristic of motor development, a quality needed to maintain and control body position while changing direction.

Our study focuses on a primary school class that practices physical education and we tried to see how they develop their combined coordination and speed skills. We choose to use a set of six agility tests that analyze the main components of agility like speed of movement, lateral movement, balance, coordination: Illinois Agility, Agility T-test, Agility Cone, Box Drill, AFL Agility, Arrowhead agility test and so on. After using some specific programs to develop speed and coordination we used the same tests and saw the improved results. We had two groups that we worked with, first group, the experimental group, included 16 students (age 10±1.3 years; body mass 40.3±5.4 kg; body height 142.3±5.1); the control group, included 19 students (age 10±1.6 years; body mass 43.6±3.4 kg; body height 138.5±4.7).

Results showed that the experimental group developed skills like speed, coordination and agility easier than the other group. Statistically significant differences were determined within the experimental group both in the initial and in the final tests (p<0.05), also significant differences were discovered between the experimental and the control group in the final measurement (p<0.05).

Conclusions. The Hypothesis of this study was confirmed - participation of young children in special programs for developing agility skills can prove to be very constructive for their future by developing skills like speed, coordination, lateral movement etc.