For the Teachers and Coaches – Deceptive Exercise

Developing, Maintaining or Returning to fitness is a lifetime challenge and there is no easy path or quick fix. There are of course a million different theories, approaches and opinions when it comes to sustaining an overall level of ‘good’ condition.

What we want to talk about today is ‘Deceptive Exercise’. These are the sports and activities that when done in a certain way might trick you into thinking your making a heavy contribution to your fitness but actually are not. Here are just three of them (hopefully it doesn’t shock you too much).

Depending upon the shots in a rally, you may not do a sustained amount of running in doubles. Of course it’s great fun to play though 🙂

* Tennis – So often it is played as doubles which means there is limited movement / running and therefore minimal opportunity to accelerated one’s heart rate. In addition, rallies are often short so break time exceeds playing time.

Why Not Try – Playing more singles and if you are an intermediate player get your hands on some ‘low compression’ tennis balls. These softer balls move slower through the air, bounce at a lower height and help drastically increase rally time (therefore reducing ball pick up and break time).

* Surfing – The image of surfing is of a healthy lifestyle, tanned bodies, broad shoulders and flat stomachs. However, the only real part of surfing that is giving a beginner or intermediate surfer a proper workout is the paddling. So if you are walking through the water, paddling for 20 metres and then sitting on your board for a further 15 minutes waiting for a wave, it might feel great but it’s doing wonders for your blood pressure not your heart rate (and therefore fitness).

Why Not Try – On flat days go for a paddle from one end of the beach to another. If you are a competent enough surfer, ride the waves you catch as far in as possible to actually lengthen the paddle back out beyond the breakers. Implement some sprint paddling to get the heart rate up at least 5 times during a session perhaps.

* Touch Footy – When I play touch footy I feel that I get anything from a killer workout to light run depending on any number of factors. These may include: Number of substitutes in your team (more or less break time), quality of opposition and where you spend most time on the field (standing out on the wing or running ’round like a maniac in the thick of the action).

Do you just stand on the wing?

Why Not Try – To be realistic about how much you got out of your game. If you had no subs, a tough opposition and spent most of the time scrambling up the middle, then go enjoy your post match beverage. However, if you had 5 subs, your team had the ball the entire game and you stayed on the wing waiting to unleash your Campo-esque ‘goose-step’, then in recognition that it wasn’t the world’s greatest workout, perhaps run a few slow laps of the park at the end of the game to top up your exercise for the evening.

We could of course go on…However, the bottom line is that so often in sport and exercise you can often make the activity as hard or as easy as you like, and easily convince yourself it was a huge workout. Be realistic over the break and don’t just assume that because you played a game it equalled a great session of exercise. Be a bit more sensitive to the differences between a tough game and an easy game, compensate accordingly with less or more exercise and you should start to see personal fitness results improve or if not at least be maintained over the silly season 🙂

Today will be our last blog for 2011. From all of us at Teachers In Sport we would like to wish you the best for the upcoming school holiday period and of course Christmas. It has been a pleasure bringing you our weekly blog and hearing your comments.

We look forward to introducing you to many a fantastic TPL course in 2012 to help you improve your PE Teaching and Sports Coaching.

Merry Christmas,

Teachers In Sport

Winning now or later – what do we prefer?

Technique is taught and shaped via any number of ways:

1. Expert teacher.
2. Non-expert teacher (teacher with low experience in a sport, a parent or friend etc).
3. Imitation (Self taught).

Children being taught by examples 2 and 3 often leads to a player who at high school age (or younger), has a winning technique for their age / peer group, however, not the technique that will necessarily propel them to success as older teenagers and adults.

Is victory preferred at this stage?

A great example of this is ‘Heads Up Dribbling’ – you can see a blog we wrote on this topic here. So often in this case, a child may have been able to run circles around oppositions as an 8 year old whilst looking constantly at the ball (bad technique) and not at their opponent and team mates. However, when they get to an age when they encounter opponents who have been practising their ‘Heads Up Dribbling’ (often to much frustration and lack of short term success but with a long term view / plan) their technique fails them miserably.

Or at this stage? Or even just any win as an adult 🙂

In all our years of teaching, we have found that one of THE fundamental reasons for junior excellence translating into success as an older teenager or adult is the ability for the younger child (8-12 years old) to put aside competitive victory in the short term. Whilst under 10 trophies are great, playing at elite level at 16+ is better.

Honestly, it’s not a stretch to say that this ‘long term’ approach is one some kids are just born with and most are not. As always though, there are variables and some students may just need the approach explained to them in order to begin subscribing to the theory.

Regardless, especially to your young ones, it is worth frequently highlighting that how we play, perform (and hopefully win occasionally) as an adult will be much more satisfying in retrospect than the under 8’s singles winner trophy gathering dust in the pool room. In order to be able to do this, good technique must take precedence in order for long term results to be achieved. Those who embrace this will succeed.