My aim for the next six weeks is to improve my general fitness. I will aim to complete one session within 10 minutes and by the end of the six weeks, I hope to have increased my fitness and be able to see a good result from the data. To achieve this I will be doing circuit training to build up my muscles and to work on my cardiovascular fitness using the FITT and SPORT principles. I will have to complete the circuit three times, without resting, which will count as one session. I will do one session every week, and record my results in a table. I will need to record the time I complete each session in, and also my Resting Pulse before I begin the session and my Pulse every 2 minutes after each session to record the Recovery Rate. The stations in my circuit will be; shuttle runs, sit-ups, step-ups, press-ups, skipping, and burpees, in that order.
Fitness Tests Before the circuit training, 5 fitness tests were carried out. These were the NCF Abdominal Curl Conditioning Test, the NCF Multistage Fitness Test, the Cooper 12 Minute Run, the Harvard Step Test, and the Illinois Agility Run. The NCF Abdominal Curl Conditioning Test is to monitor the tone and condition of you abdominal muscles. It is carried out instructions on a tape where the athlete is to perform as many sit-ups as possible in time to the beeps for as long as possible.
The NCF Multistage Fitness Test, also known as the Bleep Test, is taken as to measure of how much oxygen is used up by the athlete. They run shuttles between two lines of a 20-metre distance and they must cross the line before the bleep sounds. When the athlete can no longer cross the line in time, the number of shuttles they did is noted and their maximal oxygen consumption is worked out from a table (the higher it is the fitter you are). The Cooper 12 minute run is a test of aerobic fitness by the distance run in the 12 minutes. The athlete runs round the track as many times as they can and their laps are counted – the further they run, the fitter you are.
The Harvard Step Test is to monitor the athlete’s cardiovascular fitness. They do 30 step-ups a minute for 5 minutes (150 steps), or as long as possible. The bench for the step-ups is 41cm high and when finished, you measure your pulse rate every minute for 3 minutes after to measure your fitness as below:The times will be recorded until the heart rate gets back to normal and I will present the results in a bar graph so the information will be graphically displayed. It was important to consider the principles of training (SPORT and FITT) when planning my training. The training needs to be SPECIFIC because then I am able to work on the necessary skills and the body parts to improve my fitness. For example I need to improve my cardiovascular fitness and my muscular endurance as proved in the tests.
PROGRESSION is important so that the amount of work can be increased so that I can improve on things that I need to improve on and this makes the training more effective. It is also important to consider REVERSIBILTY because if I stopped training my body would adapt to the stress level and any adaptations from the training will be reversed. My training will be even more effective if I train within my maximum and minimum THRESHOLD, between 60% and 80% of my heart rate, and this will be my target zone. OVERLOAD is an important principle to include in my training plan because it means that my body is put under stress so I can adapt to cope with the extra training and therefore become fitter.
The FREQUENCY of my training will be once a week and I can overload by increasing the number of training sessions I do. The TIME is how long I train for within a session – my sessions will be decided by how long it takes me to complete the 3 laps of the circuit (about 10 minutes). The INTENSITY is how hard I will be working when training and in this case I can overload by working harder within the training session. The TYPE relates to specificity and it is important to make sure that when I am training, it meets the needs of what I am specifically training for.
Evaluation Results Assessment
This was my first training session and my resting heart rate was 66, which slower than usual for me. I started with the shuttle runs so that I could warm up my legs and then I tried to go in the order that I had planned but it was quite difficult as there were sometimes too many people at one station. So instead I went to a station that gave the muscles I had just worked on a rest, like after step-ups I went to sit ups instead of press-ups. Near the end I was getting really tired and my asthma started to kick in but I managed to hold up okay. I finished at 7 minutes, 18 seconds and my working rate was 132. My recovery heart rates were; 2mins: 120, 4mins: 116, 6mins: 92, 8mins: 70.