Sports and Fitness
Improving your fitness can have a great impact upon your sports performance
Improving your fitness can have a great impact upon your sports performance and a lot of people talk about 'general fitness', and 'getting a little fitter'. But, what does the word ‘fitness mean’? In order to improve fitness, monitor the effects of your training and talk about fitness, it first helps to define what it is and of course what it isn't.
A definition of fitness
Fitness is a general term which covers the different qualities of physical performance. It is not just your ability to run or cycle a long way, which is one part of your overall fitness regime. So, what are the physical characteristics how are they defined and how might you train them?
Strength
The ability to apply force to an object or person.
Example: lower rep weight training such as squats, bench presses, and deadlifts.
Power
The ability to apply force in a short time, such as explosive force.
Example: Olympic weightlifting and plyometric drills.
Strength and muscular endurance
The ability to apply strength or force over a sustained period.
Example: runs, rows, high rep weights circuits.
Cardiovascular endurance
The ability of the body to gather and deliver oxygen to the body over a sustained period of time.
Example: 5km running, 10km rowing, high rep weights circuits.
Flexibility
The ability of the muscles and joints to function well over a large range of motion.
Example: Stretching and mobility drills.
Balance & Co-ordination
Combining different movements into one whole movement.
Example: running and/or cone drills.
Balance & Accuracy
The ability to control and execute movement patterns.
Example: ball skills and set piece or technique practice.
Balance & Agility
The ability to move quickly and accurately between different movement patterns.
Examples: mixed drills and skills work.
With just a quick look down the list you can see how these qualities and abilities are going to help you on the field or in the ring. However, depending on our needs for sport, we may need greater amounts of some physical characteristics more than others. Whilst training for cardiovascular health and muscular endurance may help general fitness, it isn't necessarily going to be a high priority for a competitive powerlifter. This brings us onto another point: the different qualities above interact with each other. Some interactions are clearly positive; some need more consideration when it comes to training them.
Think of strength training, good flexibility will help you squat properly and a better squat technique means better strength training. Good accuracy and co-ordination is going to help you train more successfully for power or power movements, like the snatch or clean. However, the reverse is, of course, true. For example, when training for muscular endurance by going for a hard 15km run, as this would adversely affect strength and power in leg based movements like the squat or snatch for a few days afterwards. You have to carefully think about when and where you work on different training types.
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