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Introduction

Personal Exercise Program- Improving Performance in Football Introduction Football is the most widely played team game in the world and the most popular spectator sport, followed avidly by millions of fans. It is an eleven a side field game played with a spherical ball. The object of the game is to score more goals than your opponents by propelling the ball into the opposition's goal. You do this by passing, moving and tackling in all areas of the fifty by one hundred yard pitch. This is why tactics and strategies often play a large role in determining the games outcome. Football is a competitive sport and is known as an invasion game, and by gaining territory through passing, dribbling or intercepting you are gaining an advantage for your team. A referee is the only man/woman on the field who does not belong to either of the two teams competing in the game; he is there to reinforce the many laws of the game. Corners, throw ins and goal kicks are awarded to teams when the ball goes out of play. At present, games are played in large stadiums and players receive up to £160,000 per week for playing football at the highest professional level. There are various cups and trophy's that teams compete for throughout the season, which runs from the end of August to the end of May. There are also national teams where the most talented players from the country come together to play in competitions such as the world cup against other nations. Football is a multiple sprint sport, where the player spends some of the time sprinting, while other times running fast, running slowly, walking or standing still. Depending on the position of the player on the field and the level at which the game is played, varying degrees of fitness and combinations of components of fitness are needed. ...read more.

Middle

This is the ability to change the position of the body quickly whilst keeping the whole body under control. Muscular endurance because it is important that a players muscles can continue working to full potential throughout the game. This is the ability of muscles to maintain and repeat contractions without getting tired. Many activities need both cardiovascular and muscular endurance and football is one of them. Speed because it is necessary to be able to move the body at high speeds e.g a race to the ball. It is the different rates at which a person is able to perform a movement or cover a distance in a short period of time. This means speed is needed to move either your whole body or just part of it, which is very common in football. The four fitness components I have just described, I feel are the most predominant ones in a game of football and hopefully using my personal exercise program to improve these, it will also improve my game. Here is how I can test these elements to provide a base data to assess whether my programme is successful or not. Cardiovascular Endurance- Bleep test - where you run twenty metres in time with the bleeps from a cassette until you are too tired to carry on. You results are obtained by recording the level you reached. Agility- Illinois Agility Test- where you set out a ten by ten square with a set of cones running down the middle of the grid which are 3.3 meters apart. You run through it like so: You record the results by timing how long it takes to complete the square. Muscular Endurance- The Squat Test- where you do as many squats as possible in one minute. Speed- Thirty meter sprint- a simple thirty meter sprint where you gain results by recording the amount of time it takes you to complete the task. ...read more.

Conclusion

The Thirty Five Meter Sprint- testing speed- I ran this distance in 4.74 Seconds- This was the final fitness component and test I set out to improve in my Personal Exercise Program and as you can see when comparing it to my first test, I have improved by 0.17 of a second. rating men women very good < 4.80 < 5.30 good 4.80 - 5.09 5.30 - 5.59 average 5.10 - 5.29 5.60 - 5.89 fair 5.30 - 5.60 5.90 - 6.20 poor > 5.60 > 6.20 You can also see that I have moved up a band into the 'very good' section. If I was to carry out the entire personal exercise program again with the option to make amendments to it, I think I would change the agility training because it was not very specific because I assumed that if I improved all of the other fitness components that I set out to, then agility would improve as well, even without such a high intensity and specificity of training. My predictions were correct and I did improve my agility, but my it only improved by a small margin, which I believe can be made larger if the changes I have just mentioned are made. However my P.E.P still worked very well because it improved ALL fitness components it set out to. If I was to continue with my training now, I would almost definitely increase the intensity in the same pattern that I have done throughout my six weeks of training, this, in essence, should increase the improvement of the four elements of fitness once again. I could extend my program by adding more specifically football related exercise to it. For example, when resting in between repetitions, have a passing drill or shooting frill set up instead, however, this is only after the person has completed a full 6-10 weeks of the program. ...read more.

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