My aim is that when I complete my personal exercise programme, I will have achieved a higher level of overall fitness. However, to reach my specified target, I will need to do a six week fitness programme which will include the F. I. T. T. and S. P. O. R. T. principles. Before I begin my training, I will need to complete several fitness tests to check my current fitness, and record my resting heart rate, working and recovery heart rate and the times and results taken to complete the tests.
During the six weeks, I will complete 5 sessions of circuit training consisting of 6 stations to be completed three times, and 1 session of continuous training; 20 minutes of continuous running. Each time, I will record my resting heart rate, my working heart rate, my recovery heart rate and the time it takes me to complete the circuit, any changes that I might need to make will be edited into my circuit so that I can achieve the best results. The results I record will finally be put into an organised table, so my full training programme and the results are made clear and easy to see.
After the six weeks, I will once again complete the fitness tests that I did before the training to compare my results first time around and to show the improvement in my overall fitness after doing my 6 week exercise programme. Planning I am going to include the principles of training in my exercise programme so that by following the correct application of the SPORT and FITT principles, my training will be more successful and I will achieve better results, and this will have a better impact on my overall fitness.
As you can see, I have an average level of fitness. I could have done better in the abdominal curl test, which shows that my abdominal muscles are not very strong, but my endurance levels are quite low because you can see that I didn’t get a very high level in the multistage fitness nor did I complete the Harvard step test. I think I did reasonably well in the Illinois agility and finally the Cooper run showed that I had a decent amount of stamina, but I could have done better.
Below are the results of my 6 week exercise programme. There are 6 columns, one for the date which I completed each circuit, one for the type of training, the time it took to complete and my resting/working/ recovery heart rate. For week 6, I did not do a circuit, but instead chose to do a training session of 20 minutes of continuous running on my treadmill at home. I did this so that I could compare my heart rates and see whether it affected my overall training.
As you can see, I did manage to improve on my completion time each week and towards the end of the 6 weeks, I managed to improve on my recovery rate, except the last week of continuous training for which I was working for much longer, which is what probably caused my recovery rate to be higher. On the next page there is a graph which shows the improvement in my times from week 1-5. It is easy to see from this graph that each week, my time was improving and in a graph, it is easier to see how my results improved every week.
After the 6 weeks, I completed the fitness tests again, to see if I had achieved my overall aim: Fitness Test Abdominal Curl Multistage Fitness Harvard Step Illinois Agility Cooper 12 minute Run. Time/Results 2:18 mins Level 6. 6 5:00 mins 10:35 secs – I managed to improve all my fitness test results compared to the first time around. Evaluation At the first training session, I assumed that it would be fairly easy to complete the circuit 3 times as there were only 6 stations but I was surprised because it took more work and it took me quite a while to complete the session.
However, by the 2nd training session, I was more prepared and ready and each week, managed to improve my time. Each week, I tried to vary my results by starting on a different station. On the third week, which was the week I began with Burpees, I improved my time greatly as Burpees take a lot of energy out of me, but by beginning with them, I could get them out of the way and concentrate on the other stations. Each week, I found that my recovery rate was generally the same, until week 4/5 when it was quicker, which showed that I was indeed getting fitter.
In the final week, I found that I became tired very quickly when I did the continuous training as I am NOT a long distance runner and I was not very good at pacing myself. I managed to run for about 5 minutes at a decent speed and then slowed down significantly. Did I achieve my aim? My final fitness test results were better then my first fitness tests results, which concludes that I did in fact manage to achieve my aim, and improved my overall fitness. To keep my fitness levels constant or improve, I would have to carry on with my programme so that I would not apply the reversibility principle.
I felt that I did manage to achieve my aim and was quite happy with my overall results but I know that I would have to carry on training if I wanted to improve my fitness for a long span of time. If I were to do this programme again and improve it, I would just make it 6 weeks of circuit training because I simply found the continuous training too hard and I wouldn’t be able to complete it more than once in the whole programme. I would also increase the amount of things I do at each station in the circuit, e. g. more sit ups, press ups, etc.