Improving Football Skills and Body Transformation

When I first heard about personal projects from the upper graders, I immediately asked them for some topic ideas. They told me that it’s down to me but it’s very important that the thing you are going to do is something that you like and are passionate about. I wanted to do something that includes my hobby but at the same time also my struggles. When I was a baby, my dad and two older brothers introduced me to football. I fell in love with the sport from day one and from then on all I wanted to do was just play football, watch football, and buy football-related stuff. Growing up, I watched the Indonesian National Team plenty of times and those moments were an unforgettable experience. I was 150% sure that when I am old I wanted to be a footballer; however, I have an existing problem that was stopping me from doing this. The problem was my body or specifically my weight. Ever since I was a kid, I have always been underweight since I was a picky eater and even though I tried foods in larger amounts as I got older, it still didn’t solve the problem. This problem also affected me mentally as it made me more insecure and less confident. For these reasons, I knew that personal project would be the perfect opportunity to combine both of these and make it happen; hence, why my learning goal is Improving Football Skills and Body Transformation.

Product Goal

My learning goal will be shown and presented in the form of a video documentary along with a data log regarding my progress and improvement. I have decided to do a video documentary because I’ve seen a lot of football documentaries that are really good and fascinating such as Sunderland Till I Die, Manchester City: All or Nothing, and Tottenham Hotspurs: All or Nothing. Another reason I chose to do this is because I’ve had experiences in the past in regards to making a video documentary and I believe the skills that I developed in the past can help me make this one a success. The final reason why I chose this is I believe that there are no better ways to convey and show my learning goal because I simply think a book would be boring and something like a PowerPoint would also be boring. I decided that in my video, I will mostly include the most important bits of my training and diet including the positives and negatives. At the end of the day, I think that everyone who loves football or who have the same condition as me will benefit from the documentary since they would know how to solve their own issues as well.

Reflection

After 3 months of intense training, hours of editing, etc, I would definitely say that the process and result of my personal project was way different than what I expected before I executed it. I think that this project was one of the biggest reality check that I have ever experienced. Coming into this project, I was very confident as football is my favourite sport and my daily diet already contained a lot of food coming into the project. However, during my first day of doing the project I was shocked at how hard it actually was. I struggled to even breathe after the warmup and to make things worse the nutrition plan I was going to do involved eating every 3 hours. My body obviously was not prepared for this as I haven’t done any sports for 1 and a half years due to covid and as a result of that I fell ill while doing this project. I got stomach flu because I overworked myself because my progress was pretty slow. The biggest takeaway from this was that I should go easier on myself and not be overconfident that I was gonna reach my goal easily. On the bright side, there were plenty of positives. I managed to improve a lot in my footballing skills and also made good progress for my body transformation programme and even though I lost most progress when I got sick, I managed to bounce back pretty quickly and managed to regain my progress. I think an IB learner profile I applied during this project is communicator because it’s an essential; part of my project. Over 90% of the time, I am either talking about my nutrition programme to my nutritionist or discussing about football drills to my coach. Overall I think that this project has been a really good learning experience for me as I’m able to find my limits and at the same time improve my skills in the sport I love to do even though it’s not as much as I hoped, I’m still very happy with it.

Product Evaluation

My Final Product is a video documentary, consisting of my journey from the planning phase of my project until the end. The documentary starts with me explaining what my project is along with my learning and product goal. After that I document my football training everyday and compile the most important moments of it and put it in the video. I also added the time when I got sick so that the audience can also learn my lesson to not overwork yourself and also not be overconfident. I think that the main difficulty I encountered while making the video is the editing part because I wouldn’t say I'm experienced in editing. To add on to that, the software I used was also complicated because my Imovie wasn’t working so I had to find free editing softwares on google which is why my video had watermarks since this software didn’t allow me to upload the video without putting a watermark. Thus, why I think editing is one of the things I could improve on when making my video. Overall, I think I did okay for my product but it could have definitely been a lot better.