My name is Paul Huggins, I am 15 and I am studying physical education at the Royal Liberty School. I have been asked to make a 6 week training programme to improve a part of my physical life e.g. speed, strength, muscular endurance etc. I am very keen on sport and I play a lot of it such as tennis, badminton and football and all the other sports I learn as part of my physical education course. As I play so many sports I have a fairly fit.
Most of the sports I like and learn I would like to improve in and to do this I think that a key aspect to improve would be my speed. I am not the slowest person but I would like to improve it because in sports such as badminton and tennis it relies on your speed and agility to get to the shuttlecock or tennis ball so I think that if I get faster I will be able to improve my game .In badminton I need to be able to hit the shuttlecock form the back of my court to the back of my opponents court and in tennis I need to improve the sped of my serve as at the moment it is far to slow and very easy to return, the only way to fix these problems is to improve my speed.
To improve my game I will have to make training programmes and other ways. I will have to set my self, targets/goals to improve my speed. To achieve my targets I will have to stick to my targets and I will also have to change my diet. Speed is the ability to move all or part of the body as quickly as possible. For our bodies to achieve speed, we have to supply energy to our muscles very quickly. The muscles then have to contract in the shortest possible time. We use our anaerobic energy supply system for speed work.
Over my six weeks of training I will have 3 sessions a week, which will be about an hour long. They will consist of different things and they will not be continuous days, as my muscles will need time to rest so I will need rest days between my training sessions. I will also have to make my training sessions safe and not to go over the top with my training sessions, as this will exhaust me. I do other sports in my free time so some of the training programmes will differ from week to week depending on if I play sport.
The principles of my training programmes will come from S.P.O.R.T: Specify Progression Overload Reversibility Tedium Specify: all types of training must be specific or suitable for what you are training for. That is why I am finding activities that will improve my speed rather than something I am not trying to improve like putting fartlec training into my week, as this would improve my training and not my speed. I will have to remember that different activities can be manipulated to improve my speed.
Progression: The training that I have chosen and the amount of overload I am including. I must increase the amount of work gradually otherwise I could do some serious damage to myself. I must remember to increase the work levels otherwise I will never improve I will just stay at the same level. Overload: This is the principle of making the body working harder in order to improve certain aspects. I will have to get past my normal workload to improve my speed. I can improve this in the following ways:
Frequency – needs to be increased. For example if I were only doing two training sessions a week I would change to three. It would be unadvisable if I was to change from 3 to 4 sessions a week as my body would not have time to rest, I will just change the difficulty of the training programmes. Reversibility: It is very pointless to do a training programme if straight after it I am going to stop and let myself reverse all the things that I have just improved so after my training programme I will continue to do some exercise in the week. Tedium: My training must be different from each time do it to avoid tedium. By using a variety of training methods we will keep our enthusiasm and motivation.