There are 21 key terms in unit 1. To view the key terms, click on the button with the term listed on it. To see the next set of terms (eight on each page), click Scroll Right > >. You can see how many terms are in the set by looking at the number count at the bottom of the window (example: 1—8 of 21 means you are viewing the first eight terms out of 21 total).
To access a printable version of the unit 1 key terms, click on the link below.
How would you define physical fitness? With a little time to think about it, you might say: “Being physically fit means to be able to play sports, lift heavy boxes, run five miles, and look good.” If I asked your mom or dad, they might say: “Physical fitness is the ability to walk to work, clean the house, do yard work, run a 5K race, go on hikes, and play golf.” Finally, if I asked your grandparents, they might say: “Being physically fit means to be healthy and have plenty of energy to do hobbies, play with grandchildren, and enjoy life.”
So, which definition is right? Actually, each one sounds pretty good. Most people know that physical fitness is the ability to do various kinds of physical activities. Physical fitness experts say about the same thing, just in a more general way. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) says physical fitness is “a set of attributes that people have or achieve that relates to the ability to perform physical activity” (ACSM, 2006). Another expert’s view is similar: “Physical fitness is the ability of the body systems to work together and do the most physical activity with the least amount of effort” (Corbin & Lindsey, 2005). Taken together, a physically fit body allows you to enjoy life to the fullest, because you have the ability to do any type of physical activity you would like.
Fitness experts know that physical fitness is made up of several parts. Take a look at Table 1-1 and memorize each part of physical fitness and how each one influences your ability to move.
| Table 1-1 The Components of Physical Fitness |
|---|
| Cardiovascular endurance: the ability to sustain medium–to high-intensity cardio exercise (such as distance running, cycling, and swimming) for long periods of time. |
| Muscle strength: the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to produce a maximal force during a single contraction using good form. |
| Muscle endurance: the ability to contract your muscles over and over without getting tired. |
| Flexibility: the ability to move a joint freely through a normal range of motion. |
| Body composition: the percentage of total body weight that is fat and lean. (Lean weight includes anything that isn’t fat, such as muscles, organs, bone, and water.) |
| Motor skills: the developed ability to move with precision and efficiency in exercise and sports activities such as tennis, soccer, golf, and basketball. |
Within the motor skills category, there are six different skills that relate to physical fitness. They include agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed. See table 1-2 and notice how each skill influences exercise and sports performance.
| Table 1-2 Motor Skills |
|---|
| Agility: the ability to change directions quickly and control the way your body moves. Good agility is important in activities such as soccer, basketball, and dance. |
| Balance: the ability to maintain a given body position while sitting, standing, or moving. Good balance is necessary in every physical activity, but it is especially important in dance, gymnastics, and ice skating. |
| Coordination: the ability to move your body (or a part of your body) at the right time to produce smooth, fluid movements. People with good coordination excel at golf, tennis, baseball, and diving. |
| Power: the ability to generate force at a given speed. Power depends on both strength and speed. Jumping, sprinting, throwing, blocking, and tackling are easier with high levels of power. |
| Reaction time: the amount of time it takes to respond once you know you need to move. A fast reaction time is important when sprinting from the starting line in track, diving for a volleyball, or hitting a fast-pitch baseball. |
| Speed: the ability to move your body (or a part of your body) over a certain distance in a given amount of time. Speed is also called velocity. People with good speed excel at running, speed swimming, hitting a tennis ball, or kicking a football. |
It’s easy to see how physical fitness affects how well you participate in sports or other recreational activities. Marathon runners need excellent cardiovascular endurance to run fast and not get tired. Football players need strong, powerful bodies to sprint fast, tackle the opposite team, and score. Gymnasts need great flexibility and strength to do all kinds of movements. Tennis players need great muscle endurance to play hard and not get tired. Although each part of fitness is important to every athlete, certain components may be more important than others. To play your best, you need to know which parts of physical fitness are the most important for your sport and then improve them as much as you can.
Not surprisingly, some of the components of physical fitness help you stay healthy and avoid disease more than others do. Which component do you think affects health the most? If you chose cardiovascular endurance, you’re right. Heart disease is the number-one killer in our country (ACSM, 2006). More people die from heart disease than from any other disease. To stay healthy, you need a fit cardiovascular system with a strong heart, healthy lungs, and clear blood vessels to supply your body with oxygen and essential nutrients.
Okay, look over the components of fitness again. Which one do you think is in second place when it comes to influencing your health (after cardiovascular endurance)? If you picked body composition you’re right again. Carrying too much body fat is linked to heart disease and other diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Keep in mind, though, that too little body fat may also lead to health problems.
It takes a little more thought to see how the other parts of fitness affect health, but they do. Strong muscles that don’t tire easily help improve your posture so you have a healthy back and fewer back problems. Flexible joints also improve posture and may help prevent some types of muscle injuries. Even good motor skills can improve your health indirectly if you exercise more as a result of using these skills.
Everyone knows that good health is important at any age, but as a young person you probably care more about other things. In this course, we will focus on the things that matter most to you, like getting in shape, having fun, and excelling at sports. What’s nice is that as you apply the things you learn, you will also improve your health without even thinking about it!
Think about your life for a moment. What is most important to you? Where do you spend most of your time? For many young people, Sports & Recreational activities are at the top of the list. Almost every minute is spent either thinking about or playing a favorite sport or doing some kind of physical activity. It seems to be all that matters to some people. Hours and hours are spent shooting baskets, throwing baseballs, running cross-country, or hitting golf balls. It can be a real addiction.
It’s great to play sports or recreational activities with every ounce of mental and physical exertion. There are many benefits when this happens. You learn discipline. You learn to persevere and never give up. You see how much you can improve. The benefits are real and seem endless.
Along with playing and practicing your sport or activity, you can also become a better athlete by improving your wellness. Wellness is defined as a type of total fitness for the whole person—including physical, social, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being (Anspaugh, Hamrick, & Rosato, 2003). Wellness involves the body, mind, and spirit. Wellness is the ability to do the very best you can, despite any weaknesses you may have. Wellness means to be positive and try your hardest. Wellness involves living a healthy lifestyle.
Let’s briefly discuss each part of wellness and see how each one can help you excel at whatever you would like to do.
Physical fitness is a major part of physical wellness, but there’s more. Eating a good diet, taking care of your teeth, getting enough sleep, and avoiding addicting drugs (alcohol, tobacco) are also part of physical wellness. Optimal physical wellness leads to optimal athletic performance.
If you can make friends easily, value other people’s opinions, and respect people of different cultures, you have what is called social wellness. You like to make people happy and feel accepted. You and your friends care about one another. You want others to succeed. Social wellness breeds confidence. An athlete with social wellness usually has more confidence and often plays better.
Do you sometimes hate to study and go to class, when you could be out exercising or playing your favorite sport? This may be true, but becoming a good student may help more than you think. For example, if you have mental wellness you want to know as much as possible about your favorite activity or sport. You find ways to practice in a smart way. You like to listen to your coach and learn new things. You find ways to be excited about school. The best athletes usually have great minds and love to learn.
To be spiritually well means you understand the basic purpose of life. You appreciate and value inner feelings such as love, joy, pain, peace, and sorrow (Brown, Thomas, & Kotecki, 2002). You respect and care for others. You are unselfish and find ways to make the world a better place. You have a strong sense of values, ethics, and morals. Spiritual wellness helps you keep things in perspective so you don’t take sports too seriously. You want to play fair. You never cheat. You don’t take short cuts.
Emotional wellness means you can handle stress. You know how to deal with all kinds of emotions and outcomes such as dejection, elation, success, and failure. You know how to bounce back and stick it out. The ups and downs of life don’t defeat you. You can control your anger. You have a good attitude and welcome challenges. You can focus and control your emotions. You see a bad day as a learning experience. When you hit a great shot or win a big competition, it doesn’t go to your head.
Each part of wellness depends on the others. For example, good physical wellness improves emotional wellness; likewise, good spiritual wellness improves physical health. The whole body is interconnected as one body, mind, and spirit (Brown, Thomas, & Kotecki, 2002). In this course, we will focus on physical wellness. However, keep in mind that each part of wellness is important in every dimension of life—on or off the athletic field.
Now let’s hear what the “virtual” high school students have to say about what we’ve read so far. They will ask the questions and I’ll answer them. I hope to answer some of the same questions you might have as you read through each unit.
In this section, we’ll cover the principles of overload, progression, specificity, rest and recovery, reversibility, and balance. Follow these principles and you’ll get the most out of your exercise program.
To improve your physical fitness, you have to exercise more than you normally do. This is called the overload principle (ACSM, 2006). It’s pretty simple, really. Stress causes your body to change. If you do more exercise than usual, your body changes to meet the new demand. When your body improves because of the overload, it is called an adaptation.
Take a look at Table 1-3 to see some common examples of overload and adaptation during an exercise program.
| Type of Exercise | Overload (stress) | Adaptation (Improvement) |
|---|---|---|
| Cardio Exercise | Run faster than normal. | the heart gets stronger and can pump more blood. |
| Weight Training | Lift more weight than usual. | The skeletal muscles get stronger and can lift more weight. |
| Stretching | Stretch your body beyond normal. | The joints of the body move more freely. |
To overload your body systems, you can choose to exercise more often, make the exercise more challenging, or spend more time doing the exercise. Think of FITT to remind you of how to increase the overload. The “F” stands for frequency (how often), the “I” for intensity (how hard), the first “T” for time (how long), and the second “T” for the type of exercise. Adjusting one or all of these variables is how to fine-tune the difficulty of your exercise program.
An important question is how much overload is right. If you don’t work hard enough your body won’t improve much. On the other hand, if you work too hard you might get really sore or injure yourself. The saying “no pain, no gain” is catchy, but is not entirely true. You don’t have to run yourself into the ground to reach top form.
So, what overload is best? Actually, it’s an individual thing. You have to listen to your body. What might be perfect for you may be too hard or too easy for someone else. The key is to find the perfect balance—to work at a level that gives you what you want without any injuries or setbacks.
After your body adapts to the overload, what was once difficult and challenging becomes easier to do. The overload is no longer an overload. The 150-pound barbell isn’t so heavy, the run through town isn’t so tough, and the stretching exercise isn’t as stimulating.
To keep improving, you’ve got to gradually make your exercise harder. Think of going up a long set of stairs in a football stadium. Way up at the top is your goal and each step gets you a little closer. Once you get to a given step, the only way to go higher is to take another step. It’s much the same in your exercise program. To keep moving (progressing), you have to adjust the overload and make it harder in order to see future improvements. This is called the principle of progression (ACSM, 2006).
But, how fast should you increase the overload? Again, it depends on the person. To be on the safe side, increase the overload slowly during the first four to six weeks of your exercise program. This gives your body time to adapt and get used to the stress. After this the overload can be increased a little faster, but you still want to progress gradually.
The goal is to progress at a perfect pace—not too slow or too fast. If you increase the overload too slowly, you’ll make very little progress and may get discouraged. If you become impatient and increase the overload too quickly, you’ll probably suffer from chronic fatigue or an overuse injury (sore muscles, stiff joints). This often happens when you exercise too often, lift too much weight, or exercise for too long.
So, when should you increase the overload during your exercise program? There are no absolute rules, but a good rule of thumb is to gradually increase the frequency and duration of your workouts for the first month or so and then to increase the intensity or difficulty of your exercise. For example, you might begin jogging two times a week for ten minutes a session and then gradually add on more time and workouts to your schedule until you reach your target of four times a week at thirty minutes a session. This might take a month or so, but you can easily do it by adding five minutes to your jog time each week, and by adding in an extra workout after the third and sixth week of your program. Following this approach allows your body to adjust gradually so you don’t get overly tired after a workout or experience an overuse injury.
Once you achieve your frequency and duration goals, the next step is to increase the intensity of your workouts. This can be done by gradually increasing the difficulty of the exercise by about 5 percent every sixth workout or by adding in a harder workout session each week until you reach your target intensity. I’ll give more details on how to do this in units 2, 3, and 4, when we talk about cardio exercise, weight training, and stretching. For now, just remember that the best approach is to increase the overload gradually, when you are ready for it. You can’t get to the top of the stadium in one big step. On the other hand, you don’t want to miss the big game because you’re moving up the stairs too slowly. You need to go at the right pace and use the right overload as you go forward.
Finally, some athletes think that “the sky’s the limit” when it comes to improving fitness, but this isn’t true. The stadium stairs don’t go on forever; similarly, there is a limit to how much you can improve. And, everyone is different. Each person can only go so high or improve so much. Your overall potential depends on how well you exercise, how well you eat, and other inborn characteristics (what you are born with). The exciting part is that by following an ideal exercise and nutrition plan, you can do your best and reach the highest “stadium step” you possibly can.
Each type of exercise (overload) affects your body in a specific way. No single exercise does it all. For example, running ten miles a week helps condition your heart. It also improves the muscle endurance of your legs. But, running does very little to make your arms or legs stronger so you can lift more weight. Weight training, on the other hand, builds strength but it does little to improve the ability of your heart to pump blood. Specific exercises bring about specific adaptations. This is called the principle of specificity (ACSM, 2006).
Each person has his or her own set of goals and aspirations. If you want to be a great basketball player, you need to train for basketball. If you follow an exercise program for a marathon runner, it wouldn’t be the best use of your time. Likewise, if your goal is to run a marathon, it wouldn’t make sense to train like a bodybuilder. You might end up further from your goal, not closer.
Taken together, you need to know what your goals are, understand the principle of specificity, and follow the right exercise program. If you do not take this approach, it’s like going to the football stadium and randomly picking a set of stairs to go up to find your seat. You might get to the top and then realize your seat is at the opposite end of the stadium. To get to where you want to go, you’ve got to follow the right exercise plan.
After you overload your body systems they adapt and improve. The overload happens during exercise, but the adaptation happens after, while you rest and recover (ACSM, 2006). Fitness experts know that this rest time is as important as the overload. Without the proper amount of rest, your body doesn’t have the time or energy to improve. In fact, your physical fitness can even get worse if you exercise too much or train too hard. It’s a classic case of “doing too much of a good thing.” The secret to success is to find the right balance of overload and rest.
The amount of rest you need between workouts depends on how hard you exercise and what you do. For most people, one to two days of rest is about right; but, you need to listen to your body. If you exercise too much, you’ll go into a phase called “overtraining.” Some of the signs of overtraining are physical, emotional, and social (see Table 1-4). You feel stressed out all the time. You aren’t yourself. You don’t have the energy to exercise when you should.
The cure for too much exercise is simple and straightforward: Rest! Doing too much exercise just hurts you anyway. So, back off and give yourself a break. You’ll be glad you did.
| Physical |
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|---|---|
| Emotional |
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| Social |
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Although too little rest isn’t good, too much isn’t good either. Going several days or weeks between workouts causes your physical fitness to diminish. Ken Cooper, a well known fitness expert once said “you can’t store exercise.” He is right. If you don’t stick to a regular program, your hard-earned adaptations will go away. It’s a law of nature. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Adaptations happen for a reason and if you no longer need them, the body shifts into reverse. This is called the principle of reversibility (ACSM, 2006).
Think of the stadium stairs analogy again. In reality, physical fitness levels move more like a down escalator. You may have climbed up the stairs a long way and made great progress, but if you don’t keep putting in time, you can’t stay where you are. You move down, back to the bottom. How far and fast you move down depends on your level of fitness, the part of fitness you are looking at, how long you rest, and other possible factors.
Comparing fitness levels to an escalator or stairs makes sense. But also understand that the closer you get to your potential (the top of the escalator) the faster you tend to slip back and lose progress. It’s similar to an escalator that gets steeper as you run higher up it; eventually it’s almost straight up, and it’s hard to go higher. It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it is. Elite athletes, in top form, usually fall back the fastest. After just a few days of too much rest, their fitness level can drop significantly. For them, getting the right amount of overload and rest is essential. On the other hand, if you are only part way up the escalator (with average fitness), you slip back, but at a much slower pace.
If you stop exercising, then all of the parts of fitness don’t reverse at the same rate. For example, if you stop running and lifting weights on the same day and measure how fast you “untrain,” you’d see your muscle endurance drop about twice as fast as your muscle strength. After eight weeks of rest, for example, one study found the participants dropped only 10 percent in strength, but 30 to 40 percent in muscle endurance (Anspaugh, Hamrick, & Rosato, 2003). For some reason, the body holds on to strength gains a little longer than gains in muscle endurance.
You might dislike the principle of reversibility, but it’s nice in some ways. If you didn’t have to work at it, you might get lazy and not exercise as much. And since exercise is so fun and enjoyable, you might enjoy life less! So, see the positive side and keep on moving!
What is a balanced exercise program? Well, if you think it involves regularly doing all three types of exercise (cardio, weight training, and stretching), you’re right. Sometimes people get stuck on only lifting weights or only running. Maybe they think their favorite activity is all that matters. But, if you want to get to the top of the stadium stairs, you need to do all three types. Why? Because each type of exercise has specific benefits you can’t get in any other way.
Not every athlete needs to do the same amount of each exercise, but every athlete needs to do all three types (ACSM, 2006). The key is to do what’s right for you and your goals. In addition, some athletes need to do a type of high-intensity exercise called “speed work.” We’ll talk more about this in upcoming units.