PHYSICAL FITNESS

Physical fitness refers to the ability of your body systems to work together with the
least effort possible to allow you to be healthy and perform activities of daily living. A fit
person is able to perform schoolwork, meet home responsibilities, and still have enough
energy to enjoy sport and other leisure activities.

PHYSICAL FITNESS ASSESSMENT

The fitness evaluation measures strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity in four
core elements. The core elements are Push-ups, Sit-ups, Chin-ups, and the 1.5 mile run. The
fitness evaluation will be administered at the beginning, during, and end of training.

Core Elements:
Push-Ups

Start in the UP position. Back and legs should be

straight. Body should be pushed up with the arms fully
extended with the elbows locked. Hands are shoulder width
apart. Feet should be side by side with the toes tucked in.
Lower your body to the floor until the chest contacts (a fist
of the partner or a rolled up towel). Back should be kept
straight and in line with the buttocks. Raise the body until
the elbows are in a fully locked position. Repeat this
sequence as many times as possible for ONE MINUTE.

Sit-Ups

Lie down on your back. Bend your knees and hips so

your feet are flat on the ground. Your feet should also be
anchored to the ground. Utilize a partner or a heavy object.
Place your arms across your chest with the palms resting on
opposite shoulders. Back should be in contact with the floor
up to the bottom of the shoulder blades. This is the
STARTING position. Curl upward until the elbows touch the
thighs two to three inches from the knee. Return to the
STARTING position until the entire shoulder blade touches
the floor. Repeat this sequence as many times as possible in
ONE MINUTE.
Chin-Ups

Grab the chin-up bar with a shoulder-width, under hand

grip. Keep your arms completely straight, hang at arms’ length.
You may cross your ankles behind you. This is the STARTING
POSITION. You should return to this position each time you
lower your body back down. Squeezing your shoulder blades
together and pulling your upper arms down forcefully, pull
your chest to the bar. ONE REPETITION is counted each time
the chin rises above the bar. One cycle is completed when the
body returns to the starting position with the arms fully
extended. There is NO TIME LIMIT for this exercise.

1.5 Mile Run

You will cover a 1.5 mile course running at near

maximum effort. This run will require a nearly exhaustive
effort to attain your best score. You should refrain from eating
two hours prior to the test, but drink plenty of water before
and after the run. The run should not be done on a tread-mill.
To simulate testing conditions during training, the run may be
completed on asphalt and over a course that has varying levels
of elevation.

Note:

 The following standards must be met in order to pass the Physical Fitness test.
Performance scores are based on pass or fail.

HEALTH RELATED FITNESS COMPONENTS OF PHYSICAL FITNESS

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 - The ability of muscles to lift a heavy weight or exert a lot
Muscular Strength of force one time.

Muscular - The ability to use muscles for a long period of time

Endurance without tiring

Cardiovascular - The ability of the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and blood to
Endurance work efficiently and to supply the body with oxygen.

Body Composition - The ration of lean body tissue (muscle & bone) to body-
fat tissue.

Flexibility - Flexibility refers to the range of motion you have around

a given joint.

SKILL RELATED FITNESS COMPONENTS OF PHYSICAL FITNESS

Agility - Is the ability to change the position of your body and to control
the movement of your whole body.

Balance - Is the ability to keep an upright posture while either standing

still or moving.

Power - Is the ability to perform with strength at a rapid pace. Strength

and speed are both involved in power.

Reaction - Is the amount of time it takes to start a movement once your

Time senses signal the need to move.

Coordinatio - Is the integration of eye, hand, and foot movements.

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Speed - Is the ability to cover a distance in a short amount of time.

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EXERCISE
Exercise involves engaging in physical activity and increasing the heart rate beyond
resting levels. It is an important part of preserving physical and mental health.

Exercise is sometimes a gradual learning curve. A person should spread sessions

across the week and scale up the intensity slowly. It is for preventing a range of diseases
and other health issues.

Three broad categories of exercise:

A. Aerobic exercise
Aims to improve how the body uses oxygen. Most aerobic exercise takes place at
average levels of intensity over longer periods. It involves warming up, exercising
for at least 20 minutes, and then cooling down. Aerobic exercise mostly uses large
muscle groups.

Aerobic exercise provides the following benefits:

 improves muscle strength in the lungs, heart, and whole body

 lowers blood pressure
 improves circulation and blood flow in the muscles
 increases the red blood cell count to enhance oxygen transportation
 reduces the risk of diabetes, stroke, and cardiovascular disease (CVD)
 improves life expectancy and symptoms for people with coronary artery
diseases
 stimulates bone growth and reduces the risk of osteoporosis when at high
intensity
 improves sleep hygiene
 enhances stamina by increasing the body's ability to store energy molecules,
such as fats and carbohydrates, within muscle

B. Anaerobic exercise

Anaerobic exercise does not use oxygen for energy. People use this type of exercise
to build power, strength, and muscle mass. These exercises are high-intensity
activities that should last no longer than around 2 minutes.

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Anaerobic exercises include:

 weightlifting
 sprinting
 intensive and fast skipping with a rope
 interval training
 isometrics
 any rapid burst of intense activity

Anaerobic exercise provides the following benefits:

 Anaerobic exercise provides fewer benefits for cardiovascular health than aerobic
exercise and uses fewer calories. However, it is more effective than aerobic exercise
for building muscle and improving strength.

 Increasing muscle mass causes the body to burn more fats, even when resting.
Muscle is the most efficient tissue for burning fat in the body.

C. Agility training

Agility training aims to improve a person's ability to maintain control while

speeding up, slowing down, and changing direction. In tennis, for example, agility
training helps a player maintain control over their court positioning through good
recovery after each shot.

Sports that require agility:

 Tennis  Basketball
 American football  Soccer
 Hockey  Martial arts
 Badminton  Boxing and Wrestling
 Volleyball  Stretching and Flexibility

Risks of not exercising:

A sedentary lifestyle can increase the risk of the following health problems:

 cardiovascular disease
 type 2 diabetes
 cancer
 osteoporosis

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Note:

 A combination of aerobic and anaerobic exercise provides the most benefit, any
exercise is better than none for people who currently have an inactive lifestyle.
 It is important for people to ensure they drink plenty of water during and after
exercise. Checking with a doctor is a good precaution to take if someone has a health
condition or injury that could impact exercise levels, or that exercise could make
worse.

COMPONENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF TRAINING

A training program is more than just an accumulation of volume or training miles.
To create a successful program one must incorporate many complicated components, all of
which must be combined in the right way in order for an athlete to be successful. In
addition to training, an athlete’s work and personal life need to be factored in for long-term
success.

Seven Basic Principles of Exercise or Sport Training:

1. Individuality

Everyone is different and responds differently to training. Some people are able to
handle higher volumes of training while others may respond better to higher intensities.
This is based on a combination of factors like genetic ability, predominance of muscle fiber
types, other factors in your life, chronological or athletic age, and mental state.

2. Specificity

Improving your ability in a sport is very specific. If you want to be a great pitcher,
running laps will help your overall conditioning but won’t develop your skills at throwing
or the power and muscular endurance required to throw a fastball fifty times in a game.
Swimming will help improve your aerobic endurance but won’t develop tissue resiliency
and muscular endurance for your running legs.

3. Progression

To reach the roof of your ability, you have to climb the first flight of stairs before you
can exit the 20th floor and stare out over the landscape. You can view this from both a
technical skills standpoint as well as from an effort/distance standpoint. In order to swim
the 500 freestyle, you need to be able to maintain your body position and breathing pattern
well enough to complete the distance. In order to swim the 500 freestyle, you also need to

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build your muscular endurance well enough to repeat the necessary motions enough times
to finish.

4. Overload

To increase strength and endurance, you need to add new resistance or

time/intensity to your efforts. This principle works in concert with progression. To run a
10-kilometer race, athletes need to build up distance over repeated sessions in a
reasonable manner in order to improve muscle adaptation as well as improve soft tissue
strength/resiliency. Any demanding exercise attempted too soon risks injury. The same
principle holds true for strength and power exercises.

5. Adaptation

Over time the body becomes accustomed to exercising at a given level. This
adaptation results in improved efficiency, less effort and less muscle breakdown at that
level. That is why the first time you ran two miles you were sore after, but now it’s just a
warm up for your main workout. This is why you need to change the stimulus via higher
intensity or longer duration in order to continue improvements. The same holds true for
adapting to lesser amounts of exercise.

6. Recovery

The body cannot repair itself without rest and time to recover. Both short periods
like hours between multiple sessions in a day and longer periods like days or weeks to
recover from a long season are necessary to ensure your body does not suffer from
exhaustion or overuse injuries. Motivated athletes often neglect this. At the basic level, the
more you train the more sleep your body needs, despite the adaptations you have made to
said training.

7. Reversibility

If you discontinue application of a particular exercise like running five miles or

bench pressing 150 pounds 10 times, you will lose the ability to successfully complete that
exercise. Your muscles will atrophy and the cellular adaptations like increased capillaries
(blood flow to the muscles) and mitochondria density will reverse. You can slow this rate of
loss substantially by conducting a maintenance/reduced program of training during
periods where life gets in the way, and is why just about all sports coaches ask their
athletes to stay active in the offseason.

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Six Components to a Successful Training Plan
1. Endurance

Triathlon and cycling are endurance sports. When we think of the word “endurance”
we often think solely aerobic endurance, which is in extremely important, yet not the only
factor in triathlon or cycling success. Areas of endurance which must be addressed include:

 Muscular Endurance – The ability to generate force, power or speed over the
duration of an event is just as important as aerobic endurance, as this often
determines how fast an athlete can cover the race distance.
 Aerobic Threshold – Base level endurance work is predominantly aerobic. Often
thought of as base training.
 Lactate or Anaerobic Threshold – These are relative terms as many scientists
cannot determine a universal definition for this. This can simply be thought of as the
highest intensity (watts, pace, speed or HR) that can be held for 30-60 minutes.
 VO2 Max – Often used in a lab, but not a good predictor of athletic success. VO2
training is hard but yields improvement in all key endurance markers (specific
strength, sustainable speed, power, threshold and improved endurance).

Examples:

 Bike workout: 15-20 minute warm up. 4×5 minute intervals at max sustainable
watts or effort with 5-min easy spin recovery (this works VO2 Max). Then do 3×15
minute efforts just below your current threshold. Then a 5 minutes easy spin. Rest
of ride at an easy endurance level.
 Progressive tempo run: 30-40 minutes at an easy endurance pace/HR. Then 15
minutes of progressive tempo run, increasing pace every 3 minutes. Begin at half-
marathon pace and then do the last 3 minutes at 1 mile pace (VO2 Max).

2. Movement Economy

Our ability to move efficiently and with good biomechanics is a critical skill for all
endurance athletes, and one which requires continual work throughout the career.
Learning to move smoothly and efficiently whether it’s swimming, cycling or running will
allow us to put more energy into going faster. To use the analogy of a car, this is equivalent
to improving your body’s MPG (miles per gallon).

Additional tools to help you work on movement economy:

 Bike Rollers
 Treadmill
 Indoor Trainers, with erg mode
 Video Tape Analysis

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3. Strength/Power

Many endurance athletes and coaches use strength training only in the off-season
when cycling volume is often diminished due to cold weather or lack of daylight. It is
especially important for athletes over the age of 30 to maintain a high quality strength
training plan. Research has shown that after the age of about 30, there is a loss of muscle
mass of approximately .5 pounds per year, or 5 lbs. per decade regardless of how much
aerobic training you do.

4. Speed

To go fast, it is essential to include some sort of speed training (in all three
disciplines if you’re a triathlete), throughout the year. This can be as easy as including
weekly strides, short hill downs, or half pool sprints. For Masters athletes it is especially
important since, once speed is lost, it is much harder to regain.

5. Mental Fitness

The willingness to push through adversity, harsh training conditions and race stress
is often what determines success in endurance sports. Competition is the opportunity to
put into play all the things that you worked on in your training. It should not be a source of
stress, but an opportunity to reach new levels. Too often athletes base their training or self-
worth on these races, group workouts or the last interval that they have done, when it is
more important to look at the entire body of work.

6. Recovery/Regeneration

Training is not merely putting in as many miles as possible. It is the ability to stress
the body and recover so that it adapts to a higher level. The area of recovery/regeneration
has been widely embraced by the multisport community. It is easy to see people training
and racing with compression garments, and using all kinds of supplements and recovery
drinks.

Note:

 Other areas of recovery which may be as important, but are often overlooked, are
sleep, blood chemistry, and heart rate variability.

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BASIC NUTRITION
Proper nutrition is a key component for good health and physical fitness. For weight
trainers, proper nutrition consumption is the most important aid for making gains. An
appropriate assortment of foods from the four food groups can provide all of the basic
nutrients needed for the body to function at optimal level. Food satisfies three basic bodily
needs, the need for energy, the need for new tissue growth and repair, the need for energy
regulation of metabolic functions.

Categories of nutrients:

 Macronutrients are eaten in large amounts and include the primary building blocks
of your diet — protein, carbohydrates, and fat — which provide your body with
energy.
 Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals.

Six main groups of essential micronutrients and macronutrients:

1. Protein

Protein is a major structural component of all body tissues and

is required for all tissue growth and repair. Proteins are also
necessary components of hormones, enzymes, and blood-
plasma transport systems. Protein is not a significant energy
source during rest or exercise. However, the body will use
protein for energy when calorie or carbohydrate intake is
inadequate.

Healthy sources

 Meat, fish, and eggs are good sources of essential amino acids, you can also get
protein from plant sources like beans, soy, nuts, and some grains.

Note:

 Exactly how much protein you need daily depends on a variety of factors including
how active you are, and your age.
 There haven’t been enough studies to prove that they’re healthier or can influence
weight loss, according to the Mayo Clinic.

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2. Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates such as starch and sugar are the most readily

available source of food energy. The body uses both starches
and sugars for energy. During digestion and metabolism, all
carbohydrates are broken down to a simple sugar called
glucose for use as the body's principal energy source. Glucose is
stored in the liver and muscle tissue as glycogen. A
carbohydrate-rich diet is necessary to maintain muscle
glycogen, the preferred fuel for most types of exercise.

Healthy sources

 Whole grains, beans, and fiber-rich vegetables and fruits instead of refined grains
and products with added sugar.

Note:

 Before you reach for the white bread or pasta, keep in mind that the type of carb you
eat matters. Some carbs are healthier than others.

3. Fats

Fats are the body's only source of the fatty acid called linoleic
acid that is essential for growth and skin maintenance. Fat
insulates and protects the body's organs against trauma and
exposure to cold and is involved in the absorption and transport
of the fat-soluble vitamins.

Fats are the source of fatty acids, which are divided into two
categories: saturated and unsaturated (including
monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids). Saturated
fat is from animal sources. Unsaturated fat is found mainly in
plants.

Healthy sources

 The most famous unsaturated fats are omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
Unsaturated fats are important for your body as they provide essential fatty acids
your body can’t make. You can find these healthy fats in nuts, seeds, fish, and
vegetable oils (like olive, avocado, and flaxseed). Coconut oil provides plant-based
fats in the form of medium-chain triglycerides which impart health benefits like
faster utilization by organs as fuel and appetite control.

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  Avoid trans fats and limit your intake of saturated animal-based fats like butter,
cheese, red meat, and ice cream.

Note:

 Including healthy fats in your diet can help you to balance your blood sugar,
decrease your risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and improve your brain
function. They’re also powerful anti-inflammatories, and they may lower your risk
of arthritis, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.

4. Vitamins

Vitamins are organic (carbon-containing) compounds

that the body requires in minute amounts but cannot
manufacture. Vitamins provide no calories and cannot be
used as fuel. Instead, they function as metabolic
regulators that govern the processes of energy
production, growth, maintenance, and repair. Thirteen
vitamins have been identified. Each has a special function
in the body and also works in complicated ways with
other nutrients.

Two groups of Vitamins:

1. Water soluble Vitamins

Vitamin C and the B complex vitamins are soluble in water. Excess water-soluble vitamins
are excreted, mainly in the urine, and have to be replaced on a regular basis. However,
excessive consumption of such water-soluble vitamins as niacin, B6, and C can also produce
serious side effects.

2. Fat-soluble vitamins

Include A, D, E, and K, which are stored in the body fat, principally in the liver. Taking a
greater amount of fat-soluble vitamins than the body needs over a significant period can
produce serious toxic effects. While vitamin A is found only in animals, dark orange-yellow
and green leafy plants contain substances called carotenes that the body can convert to
vitamin A. Unlike vitamin A, carotenes are fairly safe when consumed in large quantities.
The body stores excesses of carotenes (which can make the skin look yellow-orange) rather
than converting them to vitamin A.

Healthy sources

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  If you eat a varied, well-balanced diet full of vegetables and fruits, and have a normal
and healthy functioning digestive tract, you likely don’t need to take vitamin
supplements.

5. Minerals

Minerals are inorganic compounds (they don't contain

carbon) that serve a variety of functions in the body. Some,
such as calcium and phosphorus, are used to build bones and
teeth. Others are important components of hormones, such as
iodine in thyroxine. Iron is essential for the formation of
hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrier within red blood cells.

Two groups of Minerals (base on body needs)

 Major minerals are needed in amounts greater than 100 mg per day. Calcium,
phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, and chloride fall into this category.

 Minor minerals, or trace elements, are needed in amounts less than 100 mg per
day. Iron, zinc, selenium, copper, and iodine are minor minerals.

6. Water

Is an essential nutrient because it is required in amounts that

exceed the body's ability to produce it. All biochemical
reactions occur in water. It fills the spaces in and between cells
and helps form structures of large molecules such as protein
and glycogen. Water is also required for digestion, absorption,
transportation, dissolving nutrients, elimination of waste
products and thermoregulation

Healthy sources

 You don’t have to chug water to stay hydrated. Fruits and vegetables can also be a
great source. Munch on some spinach or watermelon to stay hydrated.
 The best way to know if you’re properly hydrated is the color and volume of your
urine. If your urine isn’t frequent and pale yellow or nearly clear, you need more wat

REFERENCES:

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http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/what-is-physical-fitness

https://www.secretservice.gov/join/training/fitness/

https://sites.google.com/site/bensonpehealth/health-and-skill-related-fitness

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/153390.php

https://www.teamusa.org/USA-Triathlon/News/Blogs/Multisport-
Lab/2012/August/28/7-Principles-of-Exercise-and-Sport-Training

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/6-components-to-a-successful-training-plan/

http://members.tripod.com/~Franco_J/nutrition.html
https://www.nrv.gov.au/nutrients/water

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