I have selected badminton as my chosen sport. I have been playing badminton for about three years now. I have selected badminton because I enjoy playing it and when you reach high levels the standard of fitness is very high. The reason I am going to be doing a pre-season training programme for this sport is that the beginning of the badminton season is not far off. If I whish to compete at my highest standard then my fitness must be at peak performance.
Ability and fitness levels As I stated earlier I have been playing badminton for three years, in that time my ability has improved vastly. I have been in the Milton Keynes Talent Development Squad, and played in the Themes Valley Youth Games. My next ambition is to play for the county, and I see no reason why I cannot achieve this if my fitness levels are high enough. Fitness tests To measure my fitness throughout the training programme I will perform a bleep test after every week and measure how well I do. If my fitness levels are rising then my score on the bleep test should also rise. I will also I flexibility test to see how flexible I am at the beginning and end of the programme.
Health problems and injuries Also when doing my training I will need to take into consideration any injuries. I am very susceptible to back problems and need to be careful not to exert any unnecessary pressure. To prevent this happening I need to make sure that I warm up properly. Fitness components For me to become successful at my sport I will need to have three main components; speed, as I need to be able to move around the court quickly. Flexibility because I need to be supple in order to reach certain shots. For me the most important one is stamina as I play badminton often and need to be able to last the whole game.
Training methods I think the best form of training methods to develop my fitness will be faartlex and plyometric training. I think faartlex training because it improves your stamina. Then I chose plyometrics because badminton is all about change of direction and so this should be a good exercise to do. Using s.p.o.r.t and t.e.d.i.u.m S= concentrate on a certain aspect of training. No matter what sport you are training for, you always need to concentrate on certain areas more than others. You must always remember when doing specific training you will achieve specific results. Bearing this in mind you must also consider the fact that Individuals will respond differently to the same methods.
This means what one particular exercise might be very helpful to one person but not to another. You should experiment and find out which works best for you. Another fact you must bare in mind is each activity will have different, and specific, demands. This means each exercise will tone a certain part of your body. When doing an exercise you should try to alternate between legs, abdominals and arms.
Otherwise if you keep doing leg activities your legs would become fatigued, this way you’re giving them a chance to rest. A fact you should never forget is that nearly all-physical activities require a combination of different training regimes. There are very few sports that will need you to work on just one physical aspect of your body. This is why it is vital that you plan out what parts of your body you need to work on and for what proportion of time. Once this is complete you will have a specific training programme of which to follow. You may even find there is equipment specifically designed to help you achieve this.
P= this is where things our introduced bit by bit so that the body can adapt to the changes. This is very important in order to avoid overload. If to much overload is introduced at one time the body will not cope. You are likely to pick up an injury or be so fatigued you will not be able to perform to your best ability. So basically introduce things one step at a time, as the body adjusts increase the demands. This way you will not injure your self. Another factor you must be aware of is plateauing. This is where you reach a certain level but seem not to be able to move on. This is very common and likely to happen and when it does you will need to be mentally strong to pass through. Don’t worry though if you keep training you will eventually pass through and you will improve.
O= Overload is where you push the body harder in order to improve it. You will have a capacity which is the normal level of which you train to. How to expand this capacity? To expand the capacity you must extend your work load. You can do this in many ways. One of these ways is frequency, if you train more frequently, for example, you may only train twice a week to start with. Then this could be increased to every other day and then five days a week. Most pro athletes train on at least one aspect of their fitness every day. However although having training sessions every day is good, it is not advisable to have more than one training session a day. If you do this your muscles will become very fatigued.
Intensity, to increase your intensity all you have to do is work harder at training, for example if you are a striker you may want to decrease the size of the goal to improve your accuracy. Or you may want to increase your heart rate to a higher level to increase your endurance. Duration, this could be linked to the amount of time your training sessions last, for example instead of training for one hour you train for two. Or this could be related to the length of time you exercise for, an example of this is instead of running 1500m you run 2000m.
By doing all or some of these things your body should respond to the overload by adapting to it and there for improving your performance. R= Reversibility, easy come easy go, unfortunately that’s not the case, its more like difficult to get but easily lost. Just as progression can lead to improvement, if you stop or suspend your training programme you will to a certain extent lose what you have worked so hard to gain. All the good you have done will be lost, unfortunately sometimes this cant be helped. It is very common to pick up an injury or become ill. If either of these things happen it is unavoidable, and the inevitable will happen. An example of reversibility is when some one breaks a leg. The leg is put in cast so it cannot move, this prevents the muscles from being able to move properly. This means the muscles which are not used will quickly atrophy, so strength is lost.