She further adds that muscle helps burn fat, so the more muscles you have, the more calories your body burns, even at rest and over the course of a day. Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle to repeatedly exert force against resistance. Shah says, "If your muscles contract in a similar pattern more than once, you are using muscular endurance. Multiple repetitions of an exercise, whether weight training, resistance training or increasing your cardiovascular endurance with activities like cycling, swimming or running are forms of muscular endurance.An effective muscle endurance programme includes a good mix of exercises that put to use one or two limbs or joints. Examples include push-ups, planks, squats, lunges, sit-ups, etc. Whether it's day-to-day life activities like household chores or you're in the middle of a workout, your body needs muscular endurance. When you have a lot of it, you will not feel fatigued and will be able to withstand more while using less energy. If you compare both components of physical fitness, muscular strength is like sprinting, and muscular endurance is like running a marathon!" Image: Shutterstock Flexibility is the ability of your joints to move freely through the available range of motions, particular to each joint, for example, stretching individual muscles or performing functional exercises like lunges. Higher flexibility allows you to perform daily chores and movements like picking up objects from the floor, tying shoelaces, etc., easily.Image: Shutterstock One of the most valued of all components of physical fitness, body composition refers to the ratio of lean mass to the amount of fat in the body. Lean mass of body tissue includes the total mass of muscles, bones, and organs. Also known as Body Mass Index or BMI, this ratio is the yardstick of physical fitness. Higher body fat increases the risk of heart disease and other health complications. Tip: Pay attention to these physical fitness components to improve posture and muscle and joint functioning. Image: Shutterstock Skill-related elements are nothing but fitness modules that pertain to specific tasks, for example, sports. These components of physical fitness help the performer improve in different areas like speed is important for football while the balance is important for gymnastics! Learn about the skill-related physical fitness components: This is both, a physical component as well as a skill-related component of physical fitness. Power refers to the maximum force a muscle or muscle group can apply but in the shortest period of time. In other words, it is the ability of muscles to exert maximum force in the shortest amount of time, like when you run or swim. This fitness component is related to cardiovascular endurance. Image: Shutterstock Shah says, "Agility is the ability to change direction quickly and effectively by maintaining proper posture. If you struggle to move side-to-side or find yourself off balance a lot, agility training will help improve your performance. It helps you to learn the skill of turning, moving limbs and pivoting quickly. Being agile can improve how you move day-to-day. Whether you want to improve your balance, flexibility, control, build your mind-body connection or improve your recovery time, agility training will get you there." This skill-related component is linked to agility and refers to the ability to move upper and lower limbs on the ground fast, like grabbing, pulling, or throwing objects. Speed training is important not just for athletes, but also for those whose jobs involve handling heavy objects. Image: Shutterstock Reaction time refers to the time taken to respond to external stimuli that are constantly changing, like in football, boxing, and such sports. Exercises to decrease reaction time include running on the spot at full speed or running on a treadmill. This component is the body’s ability to direct itself and it’s a force towards a particular point. Accuracy, along with agility, come into play in sports like javelin throw, long jump, high jump, etc. Accuracy can be increased with concentration, meditation, and practice. Image: Shutterstock Constantly changing postures and movements require the body to stay balanced, i.e., upright. Body coordination refers to the body’s ability to move more than one body part together, effectively and efficiently.Tip: Skill-related fitness components require higher levels of fitness than health-related ones. Image: Shutterstock A. Shah says, "Regular workouts or any physical activity promotes strong muscles and bones. It improves cardiovascular health, respiratory health and overall health. It also helps maintain a healthy weight, reduce the risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity and reduce the risk for some cancers. There are lots of benefits if you prioritise physical fitness. It’s important to understand what fitness is, and how a person can go about getting fit. It’s important to focus on all components of physical fitness as it helps you in organising and executing your own well-balanced workout routine." Image: Shutterstock A. Shah advises, "Work out with a goal of improving a specific skill. It is important to design fitness programmes that improve overall fitness as well as include exercises that support daily activities. So depending on what you do in your everyday life, there are certain skills involved where your fitness training can assist in making you better."Read more: Know What Makes Belly Fat Stubborn And How You Can Break It
What is Speed?
Speed is not just how fast someone can run (or cycle, swim etc.), but is dependent on their acceleration (how quickly they can accelerate from a stationary position), maximal speed of movement, and also speed maintenance (minimizing deceleration). Movement speed requires good strength and power, but also too much body weight and air resistance can act to slow the person down. In addition to a high proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers, it is vital to have efficient mechanics of movement to optimize the muscle power for the most economical movement technique. Who Needs Speed?Speed is one of the main fitness components, important for success in many sports. For some athletes such as Track and Field sprinters, sprint swimmers, cyclists and speed skaters, speed is the most important aspect of fitness. In many other sports, including team field sports, good speed is also very important as part of the overall fitness profile. A vote of the top sports requiring speed has the obvious ones of track and field sprinters on top. See also another list ranking sports in which speed is important. Speed Fitness Information
Improving your overall fitness can help you no matter what sport or other form of exercise you engage in. But where performance is concerned, the greatest improvements arise from training that develops skills specifically related to your activity of choice. For instance, you need cardiovascular endurance and flexibility to play tennis. But to become good at tennis, you have to work on skill-related fitness components like agility, power, speed, and hand-eye coordination. It's this focus on activity-related skills that differentiate two distinct areas of fitness development. The health-related components of fitness are important for everyone, in all walks of life, regardless of whether they have a desire to compete in or perform a physical activity at an optimum level. They are:
When you improve your cardiovascular endurance, you reduce the risk of heart disease. When you improve your flexibility, you maintain a healthy range of motion, which improves your ability to perform activities of daily living, like picking things up off the floor or stretching to reach items on high shelves.
These components of fitness are crucial for physical health and lend themselves to positive lifestyle outcomes, especially for those who meet the American College of Sports Medicine's (ACSM) physical activity guidelines, which recommend:
If you're already meeting the ACSM guidelines and you want to do more to train for a specific fitness-related goal, consider the six skill-related fitness components:
The health components of fitness are universally important. The skill-related fitness components are more relevant to certain athletes. For example, while everyone can benefit from daily walks, someone who hits the path just to get their heart pumping doesn't need to worry about developing the speed necessary to run a five-minute mile. Likewise, baseball players need to target all skill-related areas in order to perform at the highest levels. But weightlifters can get away with focusing most of their effort on power, balance, and strength.
If you want to develop your level of fitness beyond the basic requirements for health, adjust your workout program to include exercises designed to improve the skill-related components of fitness. Neustockimages / Getty ImagesPower combines speed and strength. In essence, it's how fast you can generate a maximal force. In sports, "power athletes" are those who exert brute strength in short, all-out efforts, such as Olympic weightlifters, football players, and gymnasts. But athletes in other sports, like basketball, volleyball, and tennis, can also benefit from developing greater power. Jumping to get a rebound requires leg power, while forcefully spiking a volleyball requires a combination of upper- and lower-body power. Enhance your power by combining resistance and speed with fast-paced strength-training moves, such as: martin-dm / Getty ImagesWhen you think of speed, you might think of an event like the 100-meter sprint. But speed, by nature, is relative. An elite 100-meter sprinter needs to be very, very fast, but only for about 10 seconds. On the other hand, if a marathon runner wants to improve their speed to set a new personal best, they might aim to reduce their per-mile race pace from 10 minutes per mile to 9.5 minutes per mile—a speed they would have to maintain for a little over four hours. These two fictional athletes train differently, but with a similar goal: become faster for their sports. So speed training will differ based on the sport you're training for. Regardless of sport, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is one of the best ways to improve speed. This training involves working at an all-out or near all-out effort for set periods of time, followed by set periods of rest. It repeatedly challenges your aerobic and anaerobic systems, teaching your muscles, heart, and lungs to grow accustomed to working at higher levels of intensity. The length and intensity of the intervals you use will be longer or shorter, less challenging or more, depending on your sport. Runners can try HIIT speed drills like these:
These same concepts apply whether you want to be faster in swimming, cycling, or even sports like soccer and basketball. Interval training featuring bouts of high-intensity exercise related to your specific sport can help you improve your speed. Kolostock/Tetra Images/Getty Images Agility is the ability to move quickly and to easily change direction. Basketball players, for instance, are incredibly agile. They have to move in every direction, jumping, sliding, twisting, and backpedaling in quick response to the movement of the ball and other players. Their bodies have to be trained to respond and change course at the drop of a hat. Agility drills commonly involve exercises that develop foot speed and direction change, such as:
So many sports and activities require well-honed hand-eye (or foot-eye) coordination, including badminton, golf, soccer, basketball, football, racquetball, archery, softball, ultimate Frisbee, and more. All require you to be able to see an external object and respond precisely with your hands and/or feet to meet a pre-determined objective. Think of hitting a golf ball off a tee, catching a fly ball, or blocking a shot on net in hockey or soccer. To improve your coordination, try exercises such as:
Gymnasts, yogis, skaters, and surfers all need highly refined balance skills to be able to participate in their sports. But these aren't the only athletes who benefit from balance training. Balance itself refers to your ability to adjust your body position to remain upright. It deals with proprioception, or knowing where your body is in space, and being able to make adjustments to your position as your center of gravity changes during movement. There are few sports where balance doesn't play an important role, and there are lots of activities where balance is required for enhanced performance and safety. Trail runners, for instance, benefit from balance training because it can help prevent them from rolling an ankle or taking a fall after tripping over a root or slipping on a muddy path. To train your balance, try:
By performing standard strength training movements on an unstable surface, you're simultaneously improving your strength and balance. Klaus Vedfelt / Getty ImagesReaction time refers to how quickly you can respond to an external stimulus. Think about a tennis match for a moment: The best competitors react almost instantaneously when the ball comes off their opponent's racquet, sprinting toward the location where they expect the ball to bounce. Reaction time hinges heavily on your mind-body connection. Your eyes see a stimulus, your mind interprets the stimulus, and your body reacts in accordance with that interpretation. Much of this mind-body reaction relates to knowledge of the sport or activity in question. A professional tennis player can almost instantly interpret and predict the movement of a ball. This knowledge enables them to react more quickly (and accurately) to the stimulus. On the other hand, a novice tennis player may see the ball coming off the opponent's racquet, but won't be able to interpret what they're seeing as quickly, causing their reaction time to slow. Reaction-time training tends to be sport-specific, but these activities can help:
In many cases, improving reaction time comes down to gaining experience in the sport and performing sport-specific drills. If you are new to exercise or if you are returning to exercise after being sedentary, focus on the health-related components of fitness first. You'll see improvements in your daily life by improving your cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance, and flexibility. You may also lose some weight and gain muscle, which will improve your body composition. Once you have a solid fitness foundation in place, then consider training to improve performance-related parameters. By focussing on the six skill-related fitness components you can improve your ability to perform and compete in your chosen sport. If you're not sure where to begin, seek the guidance of a qualified coach or personal trainer. Frequently Asked Questions
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