Warm Up:
The warm up is very import as it prepares you mentally and physically for the training session. This needs to be a good twenty minutes. It should start with some light aerobic activity, e.g. jogging or cycling, to increase blood flow to your body and to warm and loosen the muscle fibres and joints so they are ready for sport. After that all the main joints need to be stretched so flexibility is increased and there is less risk of injury.
Cool Down:
This should be done the same way as the warm up, accept it is advisable to hold the stretches for longer. The cool down prevents soreness and stiffness by gently lowering the blood flow. It also loosens the tight muscles that have been used during the training session. There is also evidence that a cool down improves your performance the next time you train.
Visual Checks:
If you use a public park or field to train in, check for any broken glass etc on it before you train. This is very important as you don’t know what is there until you have checked.
Train with a Friend:
Not only does this make the training process more fun so you avoid tedium, but it is also safer too. If one of you have an injury then the other can report it.
The warm up for this training programme:
I will start with the gentle aerobic exercise. As I will mainly be using my leg muscles in my programme, I will concentrate on them in the light aerobic exercise. This will be riding my bike to the park that I intend to train in which is about 10 minutes away.
Once I am there I will immediately start stretching. These are the stretches that should be done bearing in mind that I will be concentrating on the leg and arm muscles. Hold each stretch for 8 – 12 seconds and repeat on the other side i.e. use other leg/arm.
The aspects of sport can be applied to EVERY training session and it is the only way to improve your levels of fitness:
SPECIFICITY: - training must be suitable/specific to the activity you are training for, e.g. cyclists need to work their lower body a lot more than working their upper body. It would be wasting their energy to be improving their upper body.
PROGRESSION - The training must be progressed for you to improve, e.g. apply overload in your training…
OVERLOAD: - Making the body work harder in order to improve it this can be done in a number of ways….
REVERSIBILITY: - if you stop or decrease the amount of training, you will loose the effect of all of your previous training.
My hard work paid off, as I feel a lot fitter. Before and after the training programme I did some tests to test my strength and muscular endurance and tested them again after the programme. They generated the following results:
These results would suggest that I did get fitter after the training programme as both my recovery rate and my heart rate at the peak of exercise lowered, meaning that my heart got stronger during the six weeks.
This test shows that my muscular endurance dramatically improved over the six weeks. Although this might be bias, as when I took the first test it was later in the day after school, so I would have been tired, as opposed to when I did the second test, which was after a 6 week rest during the holidays at the middle of the day! Despite this though, my muscular endurance definitely improved.
I completed my training programme over the 6 week summer holiday. There were times when it was hard to get out and do it twice a week and there were times when I had to alter the schedule at the last minute, but overall I did completed it well. For two of the weeks in the summer holiday I was in France and due to the weather (48°C on some days) it would have been impossible to do the full programme. I only missed 1 training session out of four during those two weeks though, so I did quite well. I couldn’t take my bike to France, so instead I did a 10 minute jog for my warm up, and a faster jog for station 10 over the same distance that I normally would have had to cycle back home on the same station.
There were a few problems in my selection of stations. For instance, on few weeks I did very well on the press-ups station, and it was almost impossible to improve on that in a week. This also happened on other stations like the burpees and the tricep dips station. So in that sense I didn’t always keep up with the progression, but generally over the course, I was able to do more press ups, burpees and tricep dips in a minute. Apart from this my training programme was set out successfully; I would recommend it to anyone wanting to improve his or her fitness in rugby.
Every week I improved on each station as the progression stated, accept for the times on the press-ups, burpees, tricep dips and sit-ups stations.
If I were to redo my training programme I would make a few changes. I would change the sit-ups station, as the targets that I set were a bit low. I could quite easily have done 30 sit-ups in the first week. I think that that time targets would have been more appropriate because then the results are specific to the person doing the training programme rather than a fixed amount to do.
I have yet to test my improved fitness levels in a game of rugby, but I can notice the difference in my fitness levels even when I’m doing something trivial, like walking to school.
