Physical Training: Fitness, Principles and Methods

The body only changes what you force it to change

This topic hands you a lot to learn: the components of fitness, the principles of training, the methods of training, the fitness tests, heart-rate zones, warm-ups and cool-downs, and how to avoid injury. Most people revise these as separate lists. There is a single idea underneath all of them. The body adapts only to a demand it is not already used to, and only in the way it is demanded. Read that twice, because the whole topic is inside it. If a session is one the body can already handle, nothing changes, however tiring it feels. If the demand does not match the sport, the wrong thing improves. As soon as the body gets used to a demand, that demand stops working and has to be raised. And take the demand away for long enough and the change fades. The principles of training are just names for parts of that sentence. FITT is how you set the size of the demand. Fitness tests are how you check the demand is working and points the right way. Carry one question through everything that follows: what demand is this placing, and is it new enough and specific enough to change what this athlete needs?

The four rules of training

Four rules decide whether training works or is wasted. Their first letters spell SPOR. FITT, at the end, is how the middle rules are actually applied.

Tap the two that place a new demand

Tap the TWO changes that ask the body to do something it is not already used to.

• Adding weight to the bar once the current weight has started to feel easy
• Cutting the rest between sprints so the heart has to work harder
• Repeating the exact session that already feels comfortable
• Training less often this month than last month

Why nothing improved

A club runner does the same comfortable thirty minute jog three times a week for a whole year, and is no faster or fitter than when they started. What best explains it?

• There was never anything new to adapt to. The same easy session repeats a demand the body settled into long ago
• Some people simply cannot get fitter no matter what they do
• They did not rest enough between the three sessions
• The problem must be their diet rather than their training

Two ways to get it wrong

Improvement sits between two mistakes, and progression is the path that runs between them.

Match the fitness component to its test

Two that follow from specificity

Select the TWO statements that follow from the body improving only at what it is actually asked to do.

• Training should copy the demands of the sport, not just be generally hard
• A marathon runner and a sprinter need different programmes even though both are running
• Any hard training improves every kind of fitness equally
• Doing more of everything is always better than choosing what to train

Answering a design a programme question

A shape that works on any question asking you to plan or judge training. Start with the sport or the component. Say what the athlete actually needs to get better at, because that decides everything after it. Set the demand with FITT. Frequency is how often, intensity is how hard, time is how long, and type is which method. Those four dials are how overload is delivered in practice. Make it specific. The sessions should look like the demands of the sport, so the thing that improves is the thing the sport needs. Progress it. As a demand that was hard becomes easy, raise it again, a step at a time rather than a leap. Measure it with the right test. Pick the fitness test that matches the component, so improvement is a number and not a feeling. Three habits cost marks here. The first is treating harder as automatically better: the body rebuilds during rest, so training hard every day with no recovery brings injury and overtraining, not gains. The second is confusing being tired with improving; a session can exhaust an athlete and still ask for nothing new. The third is trusting BMI too far: it is a quick screen worked out from mass and height, and it cannot tell muscle from fat, so a very muscular athlete can read as overweight while being extremely fit. One last thing. This module is about how these decisions are reasoned, not about how to carry any exercise out. For the practical work itself, follow your teacher and your own safe limits.

Work out the target heart rate

A coach trains a twenty year old athlete at 70 per cent of their maximum heart rate. Maximum heart rate is estimated as 220 minus age. What target heart rate, in beats per minute, should the athlete aim for?

Order how a programme is built

Put these six decisions into the order they are sensibly made in when planning training for an athlete.

• Decide the sport or fitness component the training is for
• Test the athlete to see where they are starting from
• Set the demand using frequency, intensity, time and type
• Shape the sessions so they match what the sport needs
• Raise the demand step by step as the body adapts
• Test again to check the training is working

Build the overload rule

This is the sentence the whole topic rests on. Assemble it.

The training session

Five questions on demand, specificity and rest. Three lives.

One athlete, twelve weeks

Here is an invented example, written for practice. Priya plays as a midfielder and wants to still be running hard in the last ten minutes of a match. Her coach starts by measuring her on the multi-stage fitness test, so there is a number to improve on. In week one the sessions sit well within what she can already do, and almost nothing changes, which is exactly the point. From week two the runs get a little longer and the recovery jogs a little shorter, each week just past what felt manageable the week before. Because a match asks her to sprint, jog, then sprint again, the sessions copy that pattern rather than being one long steady run, so what improves is the very thing a match demands. Around week six a session that felt hard in week three now feels easy, so instead of leaving it there the coach makes it harder again. She works hard on some days and rests on others, because the improvement is built while she recovers, not during the run itself. Then she misses two weeks with a cold. When she returns, the earlier sessions feel harder than they did, a plain sign that stopping lets fitness slip. By week twelve she is measured again, and the number is better. The programme worked because every week asked a little more of exactly the thing she needed, and never so much at once that she broke down.

Complete the training facts

Working the body harder than it is used to, so it is forced to adapt, is _____. Making the training match the demands of the sport is _____. Raising the demand step by step as the body adapts is _____. Losing fitness again once training stops is _____.

Three answers to fix

Three student answers about training. The facts in each are right; the reasoning is what needs work.

• A student says a footballer should train only with long, steady runs to get fit for matches. What is the flaw?
• A student writes that the best programme gets harder every single session with no easy days at all. How would you correct it?
• A student judges an athlete unfit purely because a BMI reading is high. What is the problem?

Explain why training must be specific

A friend has learned all the fitness tests and training methods but keeps losing marks on questions asking them to design or judge a programme. Explain what they are missing, and how to answer such a question properly.

• Explain the one idea the whole topic rests on, in terms of the body adapting to a demand
• Explain why the same session stops working over time, and what progression does about it
• Explain what specificity means for how a footballer and a marathon runner should train differently
• Explain why rest is part of training rather than a break from it
• Explain what reversibility means for an athlete who stops training for several weeks
• Finish by naming one fitness test and the component it measures, and say why testing belongs in a programme