Lesson video

Welcome to today's lesson.

My name is Mrs. Brooks and I am looking forward to teaching you today.

I'm gonna be guiding you through the topic of "Planes of movement and axes of rotation." This fits into our "Movement analysis" unit of the spec, and we're gonna have lots of fun learning about planes and axes and you're all going to do brilliantly.

By the end of the lesson, we'll be confident to name and describe the magic number of three.

By that, I mean that we're gonna look at three planes of movement and three axes of rotation.

I imagine you might have heard students fear this section.

And I really want to unpick that, and we're gonna break it down into really simple steps that will support us to remember these names, but more importantly, allow us to apply and analyse sporting movements.

Our keywords for the lesson are those three planes that I've referenced, and then these words are gonna be used frequently as we go through the lesson and we'll explore each name and how they're located in the body.

Now a plane is a flat surface.

I want you to imagine it a little bit like maybe a pane of glass that would be placed in our body and that would separate us or divide our body into sections, and that division then dictates how we move.

Now the three planes that we're going to learn about is the transverse plane, and if that was a pane of glass, that would divide us, divide our body into top and bottom.

Frontal plane is where that divides our body into front and back.

Sagittal plane is where we divide our body into left and right.

Now because we're gonna look at our axes as well, we do need to know that definition of an axis.

Like a plane, it's also imaginary.

Only this time, it's more a line rather than a surface, and that also passes through the body.

But imagine when it does pass through the body, it dictates or it shows the way in which our body will rotate.

So in the first part of the lesson, we're gonna revisit those keywords and we're gonna be able to describe three planes of movement.

From there, we'll be working to those three axes of rotation.

And finally, and probably more importantly, we're gonna appreciate how those two things are linked.

And that will not only make it memorable and allow us to remember those key names, but then also then build on that learning for our next lesson, which is when we have to apply them to sporting movement.

So I hope you're ready and have things around you that we can use.

Let's get started.

So this is a really good place to start.

Let's have a look at this image.

Now Sofia is asking that if she was to stand in that same position, so we refer to that as a basic anatomical position, how many lines could she draw or how many lines could she imagine where she would be dividing her body into equal halves? What do you think? Now we've heard me say already that magic number of three and we can see exactly that.

The answer to Sofia is three.

And we are now gonna look at those three planes.

Remember, that plane is an imaginary flat surface.

So we can see on the diagram there, it's been represented in blue, a little bit like what I was sharing with you in terms of that pane of glass.

And we can see that that person is standing in that anatomical position, and that blue area has divided the body into those two halves.

And in this instance, the right and the left half.

So if that was to dictate how we moved, if we moved in that plane now, we would be able to move forwards and backwards because that would be moving along with that pane of glass or with that flat surface.

Let's take a look at this image.

Our blue area is there now, but it's in a slightly different area.

And what's happened now is if you can imagine that's gone kind of been sat in the middle of us.

So we've got a front part of our body and a back part.

So we've still got the equal halves and we've got front and back.

And if we were to move in this plane, if we imagine we are moving along the blue area, we would've been moving side to side.

Finally, we can see our blue area is there again, also divided into two halves.

Only this time, we've now got a top and a bottom part.

And if we were to move in this plane, we would actually, and I'm gonna do it and hopefully you'll do it too, we would rotate.

So we've looked at movement that goes forwards and backwards.

We've looked at a plane where we go side to side.

And we've looked at a plane where we'd rotate.

And all those three movements happen regularly in lots of different sporting activities.

So we can see our planes again, with our blue, flat surface.

And each of these planes, if we revisit our keywords, have specific names.

So our first one that we looked at is known as our sagittal plane.

Remember, that divides our body into left and right.

A quick tip there, S for sagittal, S for side.

So we can see we've got those two separate sides in terms of left and right.

We then looked at what is known as the frontal plane.

Quick tick there.

F for frontal, F for front and back.

And finally, T for transverse.

T for top and bottom.

So we have here our sagittal, our frontal, and our transverse plane.

Let's just have a quick check.

We can see here we've got our definition of a plane.

Remember, it's that imaginary flat surface.

We've now seen it as blue, and it moves through the body for what something takes place.

Which word is missing? I'm gonna give you five seconds to decide.

Hopefully, you remembered that a plane is where movement will take place.

We showed that movement, didn't we? So because we went forward and backwards, we went side to side, and we also rotated.

Well done if you are able to put the right word into the definition.

Okay, so let's just remind ourselves of those three really quite key descriptions of our three planes.

Remember, we had our sagittal plane, S for sides, dividing left and right.

Frontal plane.

Flat surface dividing front and back.

Hopefully, you're all shouting, knowing that that transverse plane is that third one and that divides us into top and bottom.

Okay, so we mentioned the sagittal plane, and I kind of shared with you that I would move from forwards and backwards.

You could stand up and possibly do the same.

Let's think about this in a sporting environment.

So that could be us just running to receive a ball.

It could be with dribbling a ball at our feet and moving forwards at the pitch.

It could be running backwards, i.

e.

, running forwards but running back up the pitch to try and make a tackle.

It could be that you're in your wheelchair and you're carrying your ball to go and score a trial, to score a basket.

Either way, it's that forward and backwards direction.

Okay, how about over to you? Like I've just done there with that forwards and backwards, what would you be doing if you were demonstrating movement in the frontal plane? Remember, that's our F for frontal, where that divides into front and back.

Did you step side to side? Did you kind of move like I'm doing, side to side along that plane? Could you think of sporting examples of movements in that plane where you are moving side to side? Now I imagine the list for this was huge and I'd like to think you've come up with lots and lots of different examples.

Just really simply, was it a star jump? You know, the arms and the legs go out.

I'm not putting my legs out as well, but my arms are going out and they're moving along that sidewards plane.

It could be that you mentioned a goalkeeper.

You know, often on their line, if the ball's coming towards them, they're gonna move to the side to either tip it over the bar or to try and make a save.

They're just two examples but there are so many more, and well done if you came up with others.

So we know our forwards and backwards movement is sagittal.

We've just looked at the frontal.

Let's do the same again.

Using your body, how would you demonstrate movement now in the transverse plane? Okay, did you rotate? Did you go round in the way that we'd done a bit earlier in the lesson? And if you did, can we think of sporting examples of movements in this plane? Like before, I imagined that you've written lots down because there are many.

Just some examples could be really simply that 360-degree spin that you'd see quite commonly in a dance room in lots and lots of dance genres.

You may have even said like hammer throwing in athletics when they spin round and round before they release and likewise for the discus.

It's all to kind of generate that whole-body rotation and then to give that momentum to make that hammer or that discus go as far as possible.

Lots of different examples for those three different movements, and many of which we will explore in our next lesson.

Okay, so let's just remind ourselves.

Let's really make sure we're starting to feel confident with these three planes.

Take a look at this checkpoint and our three images.

Which one of them is the correct image for the frontal plane? Well done.

Well done if you picked C because that's our flat surface that's dividing our body into front and back.

We can see that blue that's doing exactly that.

And that's for our sideways movement that we've spoke about.

Let's use this checkpoint now to do our first task, and this should be a quite nice quick task but allow us to build on this key learning of those three planes and firmly understand where they are and how we would describe them.

We can see we've got a similar person here stood in that same way that Sofia was talking about right at the start, in that anatomical position.

So I'm gonna ask you to use that image and draw the three planes of movement.

Now how you draw them is entirely up to you.

There's no right, wrong way, but be creative and think about how you could represent them on this image.

Once you've done that, make sure you label each plane correctly.

And also add that brief description to each plane.

Pause the video and come back to me when you're ready.

Welcome back.

I hope you came up with the following.

Doesn't matter if it's not color-coded but you've done it in a way to show that magic number of three.

And we can see, first of all, if we look at that one that's dividing that body into left and right or side to side, that should be labelled as the sagittal plane.

And really simply, we then describe that as dividing it into that left and right section.

We've also got that frontal plane, where we've got front and back.

And then finally, we've got that T for transverse, T for dividing the body into top and bottom.

And now we have our three planes of movement, we're gonna do something very similar but we're gonna now look at the three axes of rotation.

Now let's just look at this image for a second.

If you are familiar with gymnastics, you will know what this athlete here, this gymnast is doing what we will call a backflip.

And that often forms part of some tumbling, which happens on the floor.

We can see that we've just got her in that starting point and then she's going to rotate over.

Currently, the image finishes with her in that handstand, but eventually she'll then come back to her feet.

Now Alex, who's been looking at this image, knows straightaway from what we've learned there, if she's tumbling backwards, that that has to be using that sagittal plane of movement.

Remember, the sagittal one which was dividing the body into left and right.

However, Sam thinks, okay, if we're gonna have to draw a line, because our axis is that imaginary line, how would we show that on our gymnast, to show how she has actually rotated, how her whole body has rotated over to then get her back onto her feet? So where would you put that line? And I'm hoping you've all kind of thought approximately would be there.

So it would be kind of going through her hips, going through from side to side.

Because that is the line that she's almost rotating over as she moves along this sagittal plane.

Just a reminder there that that axis is only imaginary but it goes through the body around which it rotates.

So in this instance, that seems that it works really well for our gymnast.

Now that axis also has a name, and that axis is called the transverse axis.

Now I can probably hear you thinking, but we've learned about transverse with the plane.

And yes, you have, and we are using the same name here, but we almost probably just need to park what we learned about planes and then we'll learn those names for axes and hopefully towards the end, we'll be able to link them.

So this is now referenced as the transverse axis.

And if we show it on our anatomical position this time, we can see it's going through the hips and it's running from side to side.

Think a little bit as T for transverse and T for table football.

I'm not sure if you've ever seen how those small table games work, but the players are very much all in a long line and they've got something going through their hips and all they can kind of do is move forward and backwards and rotate and then you've got to try and kick the ball and score a goal.

But that is essentially what the transverse axis is.

It's going through that body, through the hips from side to side.

So a little bit like earlier when we saw an anatomical position, how many other imaginary lines could you add to that diagram which would allow the body to rotate? Now obviously, I'm not telling you to go and rotate right now, but if you could imagine that and think about other ways that the body could rotate, how many other lines would you draw? And here's our magic number again.

There are three! So we've learned them as three planes, but now we're learning them as three axes of rotation.

And this one, we've already been introduced to.

So this was the one we saw on our gymnast as she was doing that backflip and that tumble.

And that goes through the hips.

Now this might be a really good opportunity to grab whatever you've got here to help you remember that.

Now I'm gonna use a sweet.

You might have a toilet roll, a raisins box, a relay baton, a bit of paper and pencil.

All of that will then just give you a little bit of time to understand this.

So you can see here, hopefully, I've got my little 3D sweet.

Try my hardest not to eat this right now because they are very yummy.

And I'm gonna take really simply a cocktail stick.

So we're now seeing on the slide there that that's asking me to rotate or put the axis.

This is now representing the axis.

And it's gonna go through the hips of my sweet from side to side.

And then if I hold my stick and I start to rotate, we can see that a little bit like our gymnast there, we've got that forwards rotation but also that backwards rotation.

So that's our transverse axis.

A T for transverse, T for table football.

Our second one, we are going to call our sagittal axis.

Now a good way of remembering this is S for sagittal, S for stomach.

So can we see on the slide there that the axis has gone through the belly button? So if we take another sweet and we've got our axis again in our cocktail stick, we're not gonna go through the hips this time because we've already done that.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna go through the belly button right in the core of our body and we're gonna go from front to back.

Now if you are doing that, I would hope that you are holding that now.

And if you were to look at it and think, well, how would that rotate? And I imagine if you're doing the same as me, you are just moving that along and we can see that's going, rotating sideways.

So that's our sagittal axis.

And finally, our third one, maybe the one that you were possibly thinking about more so because it's probably more common, is this longitudinal axis.

All right, so if we think L for long, L for length.

So the axis goes through the length of your body.

It goes from head to toe.

So our final one, if we grab our third implement, our final one, and grab our axis.

These are quite sharp.

So remember what we've done so far is, we've gone from side to side through the hips, we've gone through the belly button from front to back, and now we're going the length of the body.

We're gonna go from the head all the way down to the bottom, to the toe, and that's the longitudinal axis.

And straightaway, we should see that we're able to rotate like that.

So I'm probably doing the same thing now in the same way I'm doing with my implement.

So transverse, table football.

Sagittal, going through the stomach.

Longitudinal, length of the body.

There are three axes of rotation.

So quick check that we're happy with that.

We've got our three axes listed there.

Which of those three runs from head to toe? I'll give you five seconds to decide.

Well done if you've, quite rightly, picked longitudinal.

That was the last one that we did.

This one here where we put the imaginary line, the stick, through from the head to the toe for that whole-body rotation.

Okay, this is a slightly different check.

We're gonna just answer true or false.

We're being asked here if the sagittal axis runs from side to side through the hips? Do we think that's true or false? Well done.

It is, in fact, false.

Why is that? I'm hoping you're all realising that that's the description of the transverse axis.

That was the T for table football.

The sagittal axis is actually the one that goes from front to back and goes through the belly button.

So good opportunity to keep picking them up and just reminding you which one is which.

Transverse, sagittal, or longitudinal.

Which takes us on to our second task.

A little bit like we did on our anatomical position diagram, we've now got three athletes, three images, and we're asking you to draw an axis of rotation on each of these athletes.

So we've got a dancer that's doing a pirouette and we can see that by the arrows.

We've got our gymnast that we've already met so far.

And we've also got a gymnast there doing a cartwheel.

So we're gonna ask you to label on each of those.

And when you've done that, like we did before, make sure it's labelled correctly and give us a brief description on each of those axes.

Use your implements to help you if you need to.

Pause the video and I'll see you soon.

Welcome back.

Thank you for applying the axes in this way.

So for our dancer, I hope you went with the longitudinal axis.

So that was the one that was going from head to toe, allowing that dancer to rotate in the same way we did with our sweet.

Our gymnast, we'd already looked at doing transverse axis.

So well done if you remembered that that was the one that goes through the hips to allow that forward and backwards rotation.

And finally, and it is probably the most common sporting movement we use for the sagittal axis, it's the cartwheel.

There's not lots and lots of examples of where we would rotate sideways, but this is a really good example from when it's going through obviously, through the belly button from the front to the back.

Which brings us nicely on to a final part of our lesson.

So we know our magic number of three, we've got our three planes, and we've got our three axes.

And to finish here, we're gonna just learn how they're linked and that will really allow us to hopefully make them easier to remember.

And the best way of doing that is by pairing them.

All right, so rather than think of six separate names, we're gonna pull them together so it's just three pairs.

And I can share with you that the sagittal plane is paired with the transverse axis.

And hopefully, when we pick up our 3D example, we understand exactly why.

We were doing this with it on our transverse axis.

And that is that forwards and backwards movement we remembered from that sagittal plane, which is obviously dividing our body into left and right.

The frontal plane is paired with the sagittal axis.

That's our cartwheel.

So we knew then when we were going sideways, we were moving sideways along that frontal plane, that surface that divides you into front and back.

And I'm sure you're all now knowing where I'm going with this in that when we were doing our longitudinal axis, we'd already done that earlier on in the lesson when we were going around on that transverse plane.

So these are our pairings and let's see these as diagrams, the diagrams that we remember.

So we can see here that we've got our sagittal plane with our transverse axis.

Our frontal plane is with the sagittal axis.

And finally, our transverse plane is with the longitudinal axis.

Now really simply, all I do when I try and remember these three pairs is I use a really simple rhyme or mnemonic.

I'm gonna share it with you, but what you might want to do is pause the video and see if you can think of your own, whether that's you work together in a small group or you create your own.

Now I use simply, "Sometimes, fun starts too late." So that reminds me of my six names and how they come together.

So the "sometimes" is the sagittal plane with the transverse axis.

"Fun starts" is the frontal plane with the sagittal axis.

"Too late" is the transverse plane with the longitudinal axis.

I would love to hear the ones that you are coming up with.

I've heard lots and lots of variety of this, and in all occasions, it's really allowed you to remember what these three pairs are.

So just to make sure we're understanding this, let's do our first checkpoint.

We've got our three axes there.

Which one of them is paired with the frontal plane? I'll give you five seconds to decide.

Well done if you went with B.

Absolutely, that's the sagittal axis.

S for sagittal, S through the stomach.

Remember, we used our example of the cartwheel that moves along that plane but rotates around that axis.

In a slightly different way then, we've got our three planes listed there.

From our first part of the lesson, we've got the sagittal, the frontal, and the transverse.

Which of those is linked with the transverse axis? I'm going to use my sweets just to remind myself of which one will go with which.

Well done if you'd gone with the sagittal plane.

Particularly from our rhyme, "sometimes." Sagittal plane with the transverse axis.

Which leads us on to our final task.

We can see there, we've got a table, some of which has been completed.

Parts are missing.

We feel this is just a really good way of you linking those, that plane and axis, and to take us into our next lesson, reminding yourself of those whole-body actions which move along that plane and rotate around the axis.

We're gonna ask you to fill the gaps in.

And because it becomes a really nice place to do so, don't forget to describe each plane and each axis, which will really remind you of what we'd already learned in our first two parts of the lesson.

Pause the video and come back to me when you're done.

Okay, let's see how you got on.

So our first row, we'd been given transverse axis and our rotation of a backflip tumble.

We'd looked at that as an image.

Hopefully, you've added that the transverse axis, actually the description of that is it goes through the hips from side to side.

And that is paired with our sagittal plane, which is divided, that flat surface that divides our body into left and right.

On our second row, so that's our "sometimes," we'd been given the frontal plane.

So we've hopefully added to that that it's where it's divided into front and back.

That's paired with our sagittal axis, which goes through the belly button.

And our whole-body action is that very commonly referenced cartwheel.

And to finish with, we were given with the pirouette only.

So that's where we go 360 degrees in dance.

And because our "too late" part of our mnemonic is missing, we then should have added that the transverse plane, which divides into top and bottom, is paired with that longitudinal axis, which is when it moves through the body from head to toe.

So let's summarise what we've learned about in these planes and axes.

At the start of the lesson, we learned about a plane, and we remembered that a plane is that imaginary flat surface, we saw it as blue in the images, that runs through the body and it's where movement takes place.

There were three planes.

We had a sagittal, S for side.

So dividing that body into left and right.

There was frontal, divides the body into front and back.

There was transverse, divides the body into top and bottom.

And then we did know or we learned towards the end that each of those was paired with an axis of rotation.

The axis, remember, is that imaginary line that passes through the body for what rotation takes place.

And that sagittal plane was paired with the transverse axis.

"Sometimes." The frontal plane, "fun starts," was paired with the sagittal axis.

And lastly, the transverse plane was paired with the longitudinal axis.

These will really help you now, these pairs, when we go on to the next lesson when we start to look at more specific sporting movements.

Thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to working with you on the next lesson.