Hi folks, welcome to this video on flexibility. This is the evaluation of flexibility, how we measure how flexible you are in other terms. So there's two main tests that the exam board want you to know about and that we're going to cover here.
Number one is one you're going to be very, very familiar with. You've done this at school countless times, no doubt. The sit and reach test.
So here's a picture of the young lady doing the sit and reach test here. She puts the box against the wall, so make sure the box is up against a solid surface. She removes her shoes, so she's flat footed. she keeps her legs straight knees in an extended position and she reaches as far down the board as she can i'll follow the box sorry as she can and what some of us do is we reach as far as we can slam our hands down and say right how far was that you've got to hold your end position there for at least two seconds and we can see there she's moving a little metal device that will give a sign as to uh how far down the board she's moved it will give a measurement and what you generally do is you do three attempts and the best score is recorded Now what we also need to know are the advantages and disadvantages of this test.
Well the advantages are very easy to administer, it's cheap equipment, you need that box, it's not big heavy investment and you've got standardised results. We know what each of these measurements means in terms of is it good flexibility, excellent, poor, below average, average, etc etc. However there are obvious disadvantages.
The disadvantages is it's only really measuring flexibility in the lower back here and in the hamstrings. So, you know, if we've got a javelin throw and I want to know flexibility around the shoulder joint, it's not that valid. And it also only measures static flexibility.
So if you've watched the video on types of flexibility, you've got to hold that position still for two seconds. We're only measuring static flexibility there. And, you know, you've got to have done a thorough warm up to make sure that you're going to get your best results.
And you've got to hold the position for two seconds, which some people struggle to do. So there are a few advantages, there are a few disadvantages. So what you need to know in terms of this is how do you conduct the test, what are the advantages and what are the disadvantages.
The second and final method of evaluation of flexibility is something called a goniometer or the process is called goniometry. You might have seen these before. This is a goniometer, this little device here.
So it's a 360 degree protractor with two arms. So you've got 360 degrees around here. and there's one arm and one arm there.
You can move these arms around 360 degrees. There's the little hinge point in the middle there. So what you do is you put the centre of the goniometer, that little hinge point there, right at the centre of the joint.
So in this case, there's the humerus, there's the radius annul. Now we're going to put it right in the middle of the elbow joint. So what we do is we then get these two arms and extend them along the lines of the articulating bones. This one goes along the line of the humerus.
This one goes along the line of the radius of the ulna depending on the position of the arm. And we can then use that little cardiometry to figure out the joint angles. Now what we'd expect of the elbow near his damage would be able to expect to get 180 degrees. So that would be dead straight with that and we should be able to read 180 degrees around here.
As you can see here, we're farther a little bit short of 180 degrees. So that would, if this is this person's end of range of movement on their elbow joint, This would give us an indication as to there's something going wrong, they can't get a full 180 degrees. Now the big advantage of goniometry, using a goniometer, is it's objective.
We get numbers, we can work out your exact joint angle, so that's data. Now data is facts, it's stats, it's proof, which is a real key disadvantage. And we can put a goniometer on any joint, we can put it on the knees, hips, the shoulders, the ankles, the elbows, and we can measure it in any plate.
So unlike the sit and reach test where it only measures hip and knee flexibility in the lower back, we can measure any joint with this and make it very, very sport specific. The big disadvantage is we stick that there. How do we know that is the dead center of the elbow joint? We don't.
So we might have a human error built into this. It's difficult to always find the center of rotation. And believe it or not, you do need a lot of training to become very, very accurate using this particular method of measuring flexibility.
It's only accurate if you've had a lot of training and not enough people have. So these are the ways that we can evaluate flexibility. I hope you found this video useful folks.