GCSE P.E coursework - circuit training

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GCSE P.E coursework - circuit training

Introduction

I will be performing a circuit over the next several weeks.  My circuit will consist of 10 stations, which will last 30 seconds per station.  After each station I will rest for 30 seconds.  I will go round the circuit twice and will have a rest of 1 minute after one rotation of the circuit (I will do that for 2 weeks, with 2 lessons per week).  I will record my results and analyse them.  As we have 2 lessons a week, I should be able to keep up with the fitness and not slack during the week (not like 1 lesson a week, where I will not get used to the extra fitness.  Then after 7 days I will have to do it again, so my body might not be used to it.)

To improve my body fitness, I will have to work very hard (harder than normal) and overload my body.  I will have to increase my works rate.  Gradually, my body will adapt to the higher level of work and improve my fitness.  If I stop training for more than one lesson a week, my body will not be ready for the next training circuit and I might find it harder than I normally would - if I were training 2 times a week.  This would affect my fitness.

Warm Up

A warm up is a light exercise you do to get ready for the main activity or sport you are about to take part in.  For the warm up you must wear appropriate clothing, for example if it is cold you must wear warm clothes to stop muscles easing up.  

A warm up does to main things to the athlete's body:

  • Makes the body ready for training exercises or for competition.
  • Reduces chances of injury or soreness in muscles, ligaments or tendons.

Here is a typical warm up that most people would use before doing an activity which uses heavy use of muscles in your body.

Most warm ups would start with a light jog around the area that you are going to participate in.  For example, if you are about to participate in a game of football, then jogging the width of the pitch a few times is a good ideal start to a warm up. It is an ideal start as it warms up your muscles and makes them a lot more flexible, lowering the risk of injury. The warm up increases heart rate and your flow of blood and it warms up your synovial fluid that flows through your joints and this may make your joints more mobile. The next best thing to do in a warm up is to stretch your muscles. You must work all the main joints that you are about to use in your activity, so it would be stupid to stretch your legs if you were about to participate in a sport like tennis.  Doing these stretches prevents your muscles, ligaments and tendons, etc. from getting strained.  Following this you must prepare yourself mentally. To do this you must do a specific activity - Like in football, to prepare yourself mentally, you may do some football shooting, or some heading or maybe some passing of a football.

Depending on what sport you are doing, you must decide on what stretches you are going to do. If you are about to play football, you should overload your leg exercises, meaning you should do more on that than you may do in stretching your arms.  To overload in a fitness circuit I may add in ankle weights or wrist weights to skip or lift in to get them used to a higher rate of exercise.  

At the end of the warm up you should be in a light sweat and you should move onto the other activity as soon as possible to prevent muscles from cooling.

If you have a bad injury or an ongoing injury then you must stretch it more for example- If I had problems with my knees I would do a lot of stretches before I participated in a sport that involved the use of the knee intensively.

To improve the fitness of a body part it must be overloaded.  This means, you must work it harder than it is normally being worked.  Over a time period it adapts to meet an increased demand by becoming fitter.  The three ways of forcing overload are by increasing the frequency of exercise, the intensity of exercise, and the time spent on exercise.

Cool Down

The cool down is what you must do after you may have just completed vigorous exercise.  The cool down should not be considered as unimportant as it is just as important as the warm up.

A short cool down after exercise will:

  • Relax the body and prevent stiffness
  • Prevent muscle strains the following day

Here is a typical cool down that people may use after vigorous exercise:

You would start with a few minutes or a couple of laps of gentle, easy exercise, usually, as an example, once around a football pitch. This short exercise helps to keep your circulation going, so more oxygen reaches your muscles and gets round your body, and helps lactic acid get clear quicker. This then destroys most of the possibility of getting sore around your muscle, ligament and tendon areas. After this short jog you must finish with a short spell of stretching. This will almost certainly relax all muscles and prevent stiffness. If you have had an injury throughout the exercise, you should spend more time stretching it out at the end, as it will hurt if it becomes pulled or stretched. You must stretch out because after any form of exercise, be it heavy or light, the muscles do tend to get stiff and tighten a lot easier if this is not done.

Training

Circuit training is a very effective way to improve your general fitness. A circuit has a series of stations and each station requires you to do a different activity to work different part of the body. A circuit can consist of any number of stations depending on what amount of space you may be doing the circuit in. For example a circuit may consist of two or three stations but another may consist of ten or eleven stations.

There are a lot of advantages to circuit training. Circuits can be adapted to the needs of the person competing in it. A circuit can involve what ever you decide you want it to involve. If you want to fitness circuit, you will make the stations things to improve your fitness. You can however, make it a skill circuit. You might want tour circuit to help you improve on your football, so stations may involve, kicking a football against a wall, controlling it and kicking it back. You can adopt your circuit to any sport of your desire. All you have to do to achieve this is to change the station to something that relates to that sport. Circuits can accommodate a lot of people. For example, if your circuit has 10 stations, and each station can hold 5 people doing it at the same time, then providing they all start at the same time, you can have 50 people participating in the circuit, at the same time. There are a lot of variables you may want to change depending on the fitness of the people doing the circuit. You can change the time spent doing each station, the number of repetitions on each station and the rest period between stations or at the end of the circuit before you begin again. I have given examples on a lot of factors that can be increased to overload your body during training. As you become fitter and as you have done more of your circuit, you may want to increase the time spent on each station. You could have been spending 25 seconds doing sit-ups and you may want to spend 35 seconds doing sit ups or alternatively you may want to over load the speed at which you do the activity.

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In any circuit you must equally space out your activities.  This means you should never have two activities that work the same muscle in a row, spacing out leg, arm and abdominal exercises.  Doing this:

  • Prevents fatigue or injury in any muscle group through overworking it.
  • It allows the certain groups of muscle time to recover, rather than working them to the extent.
  • It also makes the circuit a lot more variable, easier to analyse and it becomes a lot more interesting.  

Circuits also should involve a short time for recovery because the training then becomes more ...

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