Our young adult subject, Renae, demonstrates high muscle coordination, good posture and superior balance control when compared with the other subjects. Although a young adult body changes drastically through puberty, they can often be labelled as awkward or uncoordinated, they exhibit better coordination than younger children (Boyd, 2017, 11.
2, The Skeletal System, para. 2). In fact, the proximodistal joint development and thickening of musculature allow young adults to achieve body coordination similar to that of an adult (Boyd, 2017, 11.2, They Muscular System, para. 1).
Our subject bends her knees and keeps her arms close to the body, brining the centre of gravity lower and increasing stability while maintaining high mobility due to increased range of motion in the hips, knees and ankles (Haywood & Getchell, 2014).
She also keeps her hips square throughout, maintaining good posture. The participant demonstrates an increases proprioceptive awareness of her body positions in relation to each other as she moves, enabling her to perform with a higher velocity when compared to our other age groups.
Development of visual, vestibular and somatosensory systems with increasing age is gradually integrated into postural control and have been shown to account for greater control and balance (Barozzi et al., 2014). Therefore, our subject can comfortably perform the task without keeping her eyes fixed on one focal point. Generally, postural control and balance are considered developed in a young adult and start to diminish with age (Ruffieux et al., 2015).
Compared to the earlier age groups, Renae exemplifies advances in information processing, by efficiently understanding the complex task given to her and using her own knowledge and working memory of schemes she has acquired to apply them to the slapshot (Boyd, 2017, 11.4 Advances in Information Processing, para 1). In young adult’s the brains grey matter volume fluxes from childhood to adulthood and undergoes synaptic pruning, thus giving rise to plasticity and learning. Meanwhile, white matter increases in each lobe and the corpus callosum which in turn develops cognition and speeds up neural processing associated with developmental changes (Boyd, 2017, 11.2, The Brain, para 1 & 2). Due to these changes in cognition, Renae is able to quickly adapt to the dual-task sequence.
By the time one is a young adult, postural stability is automated, thus performing a dual-task is quite unproblematic for our subject (Ruffieux et al., 2015). We observe her confidence and self-efficacy while performing the slapshot and she does not need to allocate her attention to one aspect of the task and can accomplish it in a smooth manner.
As expected, our young adult participant performed with superior motor skills in contrast to the other age groups. She possesses the coordination and posture similar to an adult and demonstrates increase balance control due to her body composition and developed somatosensory cortex.