Over the last semester, I have been tracking my workouts and exercises. I started out doing 2 exercises a week, each one being 15 minutes, and ended the semester doing 5 exercises a week, each one lasting at least 30 minutes. I have learned a lot from this assignment, but what stands out to me the most, is learning how to stay organized, and how to plan. For each week, I would use a page of my notebook to create a plan, track my workouts, and record my mood. I kept track of the day that I worked out, the type of exercise it was, the overall distance, my mood before and after, the warmup that I did before the exercise, and in later entries, my heart rate. Creating a schedule before the week helped me have a goal that I aimed to achieve each day, and tracking the exercises allowed me to create more accurate plans for future weeks.
SMART Goals: SMART Goals are goals that meat 5 criteria: they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. The way that this differs from a standard goal is quite straight forward. A non-smart goal may be something like: "I want to lose weight." Whereas a SMART version of that goal would be: "I want to lose 20 pounds by the end of the next three months. I will achieve this by planning my meals, and keeping track of my eating and exercise patterns." This strategy helps create patterns that are measurable and trackable. My goal for the semester was: "I want to be able to run a mile in 8 minutes or less by the end of the school year. I will do this by running once a week and increasing my speed each week." This goal helped keep me on track, and see how quickly I should be improving.
Overload: The concept of overload is fundamental to improve in any category of fitness. The overload principle states that to improve, you must continually increase the amount of effort that you put into your workout. If you do not continually increase your effort, then you will not improve at the skill you are focused on. For example, if you lift the same weight every day, then you will eventually adjust to the weight, and you will not be building new muscle. The way that I made sure to increase overload was usually by increasing the intensity of the workout. For example, one week I would walk for 1.5 miles, and the next week I would walk for 2 miles. This is one of many ways to create overload.
FITT Principles: The FITT Principles are the four most basic ways in which you can create overload. FITT stands for frequency, intensity, time, and type. Increasing the frequency, intensity, and time that you do an exercise will all create overload, allowing you to get better at the exercise. Changing the type of workout that you do may also help with creating overload, as your body will potentially experience stress in different muscles, or the muscles will be stressed in different ways. I changed the type of workout that I did when I switched from doing consistent runs to interval runs. This allowed me to focus on speed more than endurance, thus allowing me to more quickly achieve my goal.
Periodization: Periodization is the process of breaking down training into different cycles to achieve a goal at a certain point. There are three cycles, the macrocycle, mesocycle, and microcycle. The macrocycle generally lasts one year, the mesocycle lasts 2-6 weeks (depending on where you are in your training cycle), and the microcycle lasts for one week. For my Fitness log, I only planned out 2 weeks in advance. I believe that this was a better strategy for me, because I was not knowledgable about fitness in general, or even how quickly I would be able to progress. However, if I were to start another fitness log, I may use periodization to more closely follow a plan.
Health Components of Fitness: The 5 health components of fitness are strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, body composition, and muscular endurance. Out of these 5 components, I most closely focused on cardiovascular fitness. Proper cardiovascular fitness is required when running, because you will quickly run out of breath or feel sick if you're not receiving enough oxygen.
Skill Components of Fitness: The 6 skill components of fitness are agility, coordination, reaction time, balance, power, and speed. I focused mainly on speed, as that is how I was able to decrease the time it took me to run. Without training speed, you will not see any improvement in the time it takes you to complete a run.
Interval Runs: The basic concept of an interval run is that you run for some time, then regain some energy by walking for a while. Generally, you want to start by walking for more time than you run, and slowly change that ratio until you are running for longer than you are walking. I adapted this formula to fit my needs. For the beginning of the semester, I was running for 30 minutes straight, but after learning about interval runs, I started running for 5 minutes, then walking for 5 minutes until the time was up. This was undoubtedly a better strategy, as I saw much more improvement in my speed with this strategy.
Dynamic Stretches: Dynamic stretches are a particular type of stretches that allow your muscles and joints to move through a wide range of movements and motions. These stretches are usually done as warm ups before the actual exercise. Before learning about dynamic stretches, I was not following any guide, nor did I understand how to stretch properly. After learning about dynamic stretches, I started using them as a warmup, and I noticed a significant improvement in not only how I felt afterwards, but also my willingness to stretch before exercise.
Even though I learned a lot from this experience, I can confidently say that there are two areas that I saw great improvement in myself. Those two areas are character and communication. The biggest way that I showed character during this assignment was through perseverance and drive. Both of these characteristics helped me continue working, and prevented me from giving up. There were many times that I did not want to put in the effort or thought that it was not worth it, but no matter what, I continued and put my best work in. This is an incredibly valuable skill that I have been trying to improve at for years, and this challenge only helped my in that endeavor. Secondly, I showed communication through the organization of my fitness logs, and the integration of key ideas from the class. I organized my fitness logs in such a way that anyone would be capable of understanding my progress by looking at it. I did not want to overcomplicate my log and I succeeded in that aspect. I believe that this is a key component of communication, as being able to concisely package ideas and actions into a comprehensible explanation is necessary not only to get through school, but also to get through life. I also showed communication through receiving information and adapting my project to incorporate that information. In the beginning my fitness log did not contain dynamic stretches, restorative yoga, or track my heart rate, but I incorporated all of these ideas as I learned them to show that I can not only share ideas, but adapt due to new information as well. In the end I am very grateful for this project, and I learned a lot. Not only about fitness, but also about myself and my personal habits.
While I believe that I did quite well in many ways, I am always looking for ways to improve and to better myself, and there are two clear categories that I can improve on. These categories are learning conscientiously, and thinking critically. The way that I can improve on both of these skills comes down to my use of planning. To learn more conscientiously, I need to plan my time better. For the past semester, I have been doing exercises that have lasted for not much longer than 30 minutes. While this meets the requirements, I would have loved to spend more time improving. For a while I thought that this problem came down to the amount of time I had, but in reality it was an issue with how I was spending and organizing my time. For the last few weeks, I started waking up at 5:30 and doing my exercises in the morning. This made a tremendous difference, as it gave me more time in the afternoon, and I had a long stretch of time to work out in the morning to exercise, rather than cramming it in in the afternoon. I should have sat down earlier in the semester and planned my time out better. This would have made a tremendous difference. Along with that, I should have thought more critically during this assignment. I had my goal, but I never set mile stones for myself to check my progress. This was a huge oversight, and resulted in me not seeing a clear path to my goal. Another way that I should have thought critically was by analyzing my data throughout the weeks. I had all of the information that I needed to create a robust plan extending further than two weeks into the future, but I never effectively utilized this data. Rather, I would make an educated guess about what I could do for the next weeks, but that was still only a guess. If I were to do this again I would graph my progress over the semester, both so that I could more easily see my achievements, but also so that I had a more accurate plan for the oncoming weeks. In the end I am pretty happy with my fitness log, but I can always take away lessons and realize what I can improve on in the future.