At the end of the lesson, the student will be able to:
a. apply the phases of exercises when doing physical activities;
b. discuss the principles of exercise;
c. execute endurance exercises properly;
d. value the importance of exercises to oneself.
Exercise may be a prominent term when we talk about health and well-being. Health professionals around the world are pointing their fingers on exercise as the best prevention for cardiovascular diseases (CVD’s). However, there are still a lot concerns as regards this matter because of the lack of correct information concerning the when, where, why and how of exercise.
In this lesson, you are expected to strengthen your knowledge and apply this to your daily activity. You will enjoy the impact of your effort if all these are done in a correct and enjoyable way. So listen to your Instructor and integrate the instructions to your daily lives.
A. Phases of Exercise
1. Warm-Up Exercise
Warming up before you get into hard muscle work is the best thing you can do to prevent injury an maximize the energy produced by the muscles as you command your muscles to contract and relax.
Perhaps, all fitness Guru has reminded you to warm up every time you exercise but they left you hanging when it comes to why you should warm. There are still wrong notions about warm up exercises we encounter in sports training and fitness gym instructions.
The aim of warm up exercise is to gradually increase the body temperature until your muscles are ready to work, by increasing blood flow to the muscles. How will you know if your body is ready depends on your fitness level. Normally, when you start to sweat profusely and your heart raised to 80% of your maximum heart rate, then your muscles must be ready for a harder work to do. Warming up lessens the muscle sore 24 after exercising.
Some examples of warm up exercises
1. Walking (3 mins)
2. High knee jog
3. Jogging
4. Star jumps
5. Jumping jacks
6. Skipping rope
Always remember to elevate you heart rate first before you push on to hard muscle contraction.
2. Stretching
When you already have sweat profusely, it’s time to stretch major muscle groups. If the aim is for fitness, both types of stretching; dynamic and static stretching will serve you best. Static stretching is when you extend, bend or twist body parts and sustain for certain counts, along with correct breathing. Correct breathing is when are about to execute the stretch, bring out all the air in your lungs and when you are holding the stretch.
Examples
Static Stretches
1. Standing Quadriceps Stretch
2. Forward Lunge (Sustained)
3. Forward lunge with a twist
4. Straight leg lunge
5. Wide Legged Forward Bend
6. Iliotibial Band Stretch
Dynamic Stretches
1. Standing Knee Crunch
2. Lateral Low Lunge (Repetition)
3. Walking Lunges
4. Knee Squats
5. Plank Knee Pull In
3. Main Workout
The main workout referred here is the exercise routine you want to take. People exercise for varied reasons; for skills development in sports or in dance or for health and wellness. Whatever is your drive to exercise ultimately, it will lead to lifelong participation of physical activity, which is generally is beneficial to you. However, our instructions in your Physical Education class will focus on health and wellness.
In your main workout comes the principles exercise; Principle of Progression, Regularity, Overload, Variety, Recovery, Balance, Specificity, and Reversibility. These principles are what sports trainers adhere in training athletes, but for health and fitness, this can also be applied.
a. Principle of Progression is the slow increase of the number of sets and repetitions. This creates stress to the body to promote adaptations promoting growth, strength, and endurance of the muscles used during exercise.
b. Principle of Regularity is the consistently of your engagement to exercise. For an exercise to be effective it is best to have in a regular interval.
c. Principle of Variety. Variety is the key. Exercise routine can lead to boredom, if you keep repeating the same sets of movements. It is important to mix up things a bit and include different activities. With variety of examples in fitness through video and website, you will never run out of variety.
d. Principle of Recovery- The recovery period is as important as the training itself. Recovery period is the time when your muscles repair the damaged muscle tissue. It is in the recovery time that your body is still burning calories for growth and repair. Without recovery time, muscle fatigue, and increase the potential for injury.
e. Principle of Balance is to ensure that the exercise program utilize all areas if your body to achieve a balance level of fitness. Meaning, when you exercise the upper right side area of the muscle group, it must follow that the right side will also have the same utilization.
f. Principle of Specificity suggest that you set your exercise to a goal. For instance, you want to improve muscles strength in your legs, then the muscles groups in the legs must be used. If you focus also on running, then training design is for running either running for fitness or for sports.
g. Principle of Reversibility
After certain adaptation of your body to exercise, the effects of training to athletes is expected to decline upon stopping. The state of body’s capacity goes back to the pre-training period. Whatever gain you get from the training will decline.
4. Cooling Down
During warm up, you gradually increase the temperature of the body to increase blood flow to the working muscles. In cooling down, it’s the same. You will allow your body to gradually decrease its temperature after engaging in an exercise. It will last 3-10 minutes and will include some stretches of the muscle used during the workout to promote relaxation by allowing your heart rate return to normal. Some yoga poses can also be used if the target muscles are stretched while posing.
B. Endurance Exercises
Physical activity for health and fitness or sports needs to have the right combination of endurance, strength, and flexibility training. In this text, we will look into each of these types.
We start with endurance exercise. Endurance exercises elevate your heart rate, forcing your body to use oxygen as you continue the routine. There are benefits of engaging in endurance exercises such as the increase of the mitochondrial number within the cell. We have known mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell. The production of energy happens in it when oxygen meets the ATP stored in the muscles during cell respiration. The more mitochondria each cell contains, the more power a person can generate. This is why marathon runners can run for a longer time. Highly endurance-trained individuals sustain hours of moderate exercise intensity.
Aside from increasing the mitochondrial number, it will also promote better transportation of blood throughout the body. Endurance exercises improve blood flow by dilating blood vessels and increasing blood presence in all parts of the body.
The brain can also benefit from engaging in endurance exercise. A significant amount of researches proves that endurance decreases the susceptibility of a person to fatigue; this increases their efficiency and is emotionally stable.
Lastly, endurance exercises strengthen cardiac muscle. By increasing cardiac output, the heart pumps blood stronger in a single beat; this makes the heart work less. On average, the heart beats 72 times in one minute. A trained individual has lower heat beats, they can go down to 40 beats per minute. For a trained individual, his heartbeats 86,400 in 24 hours. An average person beats 103,680 beats; this is 17,280 more heartbeat than trained individuals. Physical activity for health and fitness or sports need to have the right combination of endurance, strength, and flexibility training. In this text, we will look into each of these types.
Imagine the work of your heart in your lifetime. Hence the less but strong pumps, the healthier it is for the heart.
If you aim to sustain natural energy daily, engage in an endurance exercise at least 30 minutes a day — no need for synthetic supplements to address energy of the heart.
Instructions: Perform the following sets of exercises below. Record (video should be raw and unedited) yourself doing the exercises. Upload your respective video in the Google Classroom. Follow the recommended number of seconds for the video submission.
Set 1 video:
1. Jog in place – 30 sec.
2. Jumping jacks – 30 sec.
3. High knee jog – 30 sec.
4. Box jump - 30 sec.
5. Squat jump – 30 sec.
6. Run shuffle run - 30 sec.
Do the following sets of exercises every other day. After 24 hours, you may feel muscle pain, especially if you are a beginner. This is an indicator that your muscles were working hard during your exercise. This is also the time that your muscle starts to heal as some of the muscle tissues were torn off during the contraction. The pain will eventually subside in a day or two. The pain also is caused by the accumulated pyruvic acid in the muscle during contraction; this acid was not flashed out from the tissue due to poor quality of warming up and cooling down. Warming up and cooling down is excellent as the main workout in getting the most of the effort you made when you exercise.
Excellence: Discipline
Galatians 5:22-23
If we let our desires lead our decisions, our lives (and our bodies) can quickly spin out of control. Self-control is a discipline that God grows in us when we continually choose to die to our flesh and live in Him.