Why Coordination — Not Strength or Speed — Determines Your Child’s Athletic Ceiling
A question posed to elite coaches, a speed skater’s quiet answer, and a lesson from China that changed how I train every youth athlete who walks through the door.
The Question That Silenced the Room
In 2002, as an undergrad sitting in a cramped meeting room deep inside the Olympic Oval at the University of Calgary, I learned a lesson that would shape every year of my coaching career.
The room was filled with elite coaches — speed skating, track and field, bobsleigh, swimming, strength and conditioning. The kind of minds you quietly study and hope to impress one day. After the main agenda, Dr. Matthew Jordan, then the head of strength at the Oval, opened the floor.
Someone posed a deceptively simple question:
“If you could give an athlete one biomotor quality for life, which would it be?”
Predictable answers erupted: Strength. Speed. Endurance. Agility. Explosiveness. All valid. All incomplete.
Then a quiet voice cut through the noise. It belonged to a speed skater — someone who looked more like a scientist than an athlete. He said something I didn’t fully understand at the time:
“When I was young, I wasn’t strong or fast. I had to master timing and angles. That’s how I learned to skate fast.”
— Jeremy Wotherspoon, one of the greatest sprint technicians in speed skating historyWhat he was really talking about was coordination.
And the longer I coach — across continents, Olympic cycles, youth development systems, and now here in Calgary — the more I realize: coordination is the single most important biomotor quality in sport. More than strength. More than speed. More than endurance. It is the organizing intelligence behind all movement.
What Coordination Really Is
Coordination is not “looking smooth.” Sport scientists define it as the nervous regulation of muscular activity enabling efficient movement and technical mastery. That means activating the right muscles, at precisely the right moment, while inhibiting all the wrong ones — under speed, fatigue, pressure, and uncertainty.
This is the silent engine beneath every skill in sport: skating stride efficiency, soccer first-step acceleration, cutting mechanics, deceleration and reacceleration, jumping and landing mechanics, balance under contact, skill execution under fatigue.
Without coordination, every other quality degrades. Strength becomes stiffness — the athlete who can squat heavy but can’t change direction without braking. Speed becomes chaos — fast in a straight line, dangerous in a turn. Agility becomes randomness — reactive but never precise. Endurance becomes sloppy mechanics repeated ten thousand times.
With coordination, those same qualities transform. Strength expresses as power. Speed expresses as control. Agility becomes decision-making. Endurance becomes efficiency that compounds over a season.
Coordination is not one thing — it’s an ecosystem:
It is the adhesive binding every other biomotor ability into something functional.
Sports scientist Józef Drabik makes the mechanism explicit: “good coordination improves strength by engaging the muscles most adequate to a given task in the most efficient order, inhibiting their antagonists and regulating the frequency of nerve impulses. Coordination affects the speed of movement by regulating the nervous system’s capacity to mobilize or change from one movement pattern to another. Besides, well coordinated movements are economical, and thus can be faster than less coordinated” (Children and Sports Training, p.68). Speed coaches talk about fast-twitch fibre. Strength coaches talk about power output. Nobody talks about the quality that determines how efficiently that force gets expressed. That quality is coordination. And it develops on a timeline that won’t wait for the conversation to catch up.
When Do Youth Athletes Develop Coordination? Peak Ages by Ability
Coordination develops most rapidly between ages 7 and 14, peaking around 10–13. This is not guesswork. It’s neurology. During these years, myelination increases rapidly, synaptic pruning accelerates, motor cortex plasticity peaks, and athletes absorb movement patterns like a sponge.
Different sub-qualities have their own peaks:
The table above reflects coordination sub-quality peaks compiled from developmental research synthesized by Drabik — including the greatest pace of overall coordination development occurring at ages 8–9 and again at 11–12 for boys, with the process effectively complete by 16–18 (Children and Sports Training, p.68). Critically, Drabik also identifies what drives the movement library beneath these windows: “the speed of learning and the ability to perfect movement depends on the size of one’s stored experiences of movements — those who have more will learn more easily.” This is the scientific basis for the Movement Vocabulary pillar below. The window doesn’t just train coordination. It builds the library that makes all future skill acquisition faster.
By 16–18, coordination is largely mature. This means something uncomfortable:
You can build strength anytime. You can build speed for decades. But there is a narrow window to build world-class coordination. Miss it, and the ceiling drops forever. This is why early specialization destroys more careers than it creates. This is why “grind culture” erases motor learning. And this is why youth strength programs that prioritize load before motor control are fundamentally misguided.
What Shapes Coordination: Three Pillars
China: Coordination Weaponized at the Highest Level
From 2006 to 2010, coaching the Chinese National Short Track Speed Skating Team under Li Yan, I saw coordination elevated to an artform.
We trained timing, proprioceptive accuracy, cross-body linkages, balance under fatigue, precision under speed, and technical consistency under pressure.
Wang Meng‘s legendary banded crossovers across an entire soccer field — in August heat, legs shaking, Li Yan crouched beside her demanding one more perfect rep — is the purest illustration of coordination mastery I’ve ever seen.
She was already the best in the world. But her coordination sharpened further. And that is why nobody could touch her.
Why Jungle Athletics Prioritizes Coordination Above Everything
Parents often ask: “Why does my child look smoother, faster, and more confident within weeks?”
This is why. We target the sensitive periods. We build the software before the hardware. We train the central nervous system, not just the muscles. We measure quality, not just output. We teach athletes to adapt, not just repeat.
Strength matters. Speed matters. But coordination determines whether your athlete can express those qualities in the chaos of sport.
“Coordination is the single most important biomotor quality in sport. It is the organizing intelligence behind all movement.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryDevelopment System Explained
If this article is your first introduction to Jungle Athletics, coordination training is one piece of a larger development system. Before booking, most parents find it useful to understand how the sensitive periods, the training approach, and the athlete analysis all connect.
How Coordinated Is
Your Athlete?
Book your athlete’s Free Athlete Analysis. 60 minutes. Our coaches will assess coordination quality, movement vocabulary, and nervous system readiness — then tell you exactly what to build and when.
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