Components of fitness and how to train
Physical Education · Key Stage 3 · The School
The components
CARDIOVASCULAR ENDURANCE, MUSCULAR ENDURANCE, STRENGTH, FLEXIBILITY, SPEED, POWER, AGILITY, BALANCE, COORDINATION, REACTION TIME. A marathon runner and a shot-putter both need fitness — completely different parts of it. Saying someone is simply 'fit' is meaningless without saying for what.
FITT
FREQUENCY (how often), INTENSITY (how hard), TIME (how long), TYPE (what kind). To improve, change one of them — the principle of PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD. Change all four at once and you cannot tell what worked, and you are far more likely to get injured.
Matching method to goal
CONTINUOUS training for cardiovascular endurance. INTERVAL for speed and recovery. FARTLEK for varied-pace sports. CIRCUIT for all-round. WEIGHT training for strength and power. PLYOMETRICS for explosive power. Naming the method AND the goal it serves is the examined skill.
Overload, applied over six weeks
A netball player wants better cardiovascular endurance. Week one: three sessions of twenty minutes at a pace she can just hold a conversation at. To progress she changes ONE thing at a time — week three, twenty-five minutes at the same pace (TIME); week five, the same twenty-five minutes but faster (INTENSITY). Change both together and if she is exhausted she cannot tell which did it. She also has to measure, or "better" is a feeling: the multi-stage fitness test for cardiovascular endurance, the sit-and-reach for flexibility, the 30-metre sprint for speed, the standing broad jump for power. Test at the start, train, test again with the SAME protocol — a test done differently the second time measures nothing.