Age and disability

One that affects you living body and therefore affects you physically.

• very young children cannot cope with differcult tasks, which can affect their learning and practice.
• flexibility decreases with age and makes activities like gymnastics, harder as you get older.
• oxygen capacity and reaction time decrease as you get older.
• injury and disease become more common as you get older, bones can become more brittle and recovery times are longer.
• skill level starts to increase as you get into your teens and twenties but then start to decline as you get older.
• strength start to increase as you get older peaking in the twenties and thirties but then decreasing after that.

• deciding factor for the majority of sports
• competitions are usually divided up into set catagories
• in school, year groups.
• in sport and governing bodies, it is usually age groups eg under 14s, 15s ...
• it allows gifted people to go into the age group above but not older people to go below.

Disability can be physical or mental. It can also be permanent or temporary.

• activities: there a huge range of ways in which activites are adapted to allow disabled people to participate. for example- wheelchair rugby, who has specific rules relating to wheelchairs themselves.
• equipment: such as footballs used by blind footballers that have ball bearings inside the ball, which the players can hear as the ball moves.
• disability classifications: these ensure that disabled competitors are able to compete with others who have the same, or a very similar disability, so the competition is fairer.
• provision for the disabled: theis includes designated wider parking bays in car parks, ramp acces for wheelchairs, disabled lifts, automatic doors, special changing areas and toilets, wider corridoors etc...