Habits – 21 Days to break, make and reinforce.

Habits are hard to break and often just as hard to make…we all know that. However, have you heard of the rough formula attached to successful making and breaking of habits? I find it both interesting and motivating whenever I want to start or stop doing something. This is how it goes:

• 21 days to break (an old) habit.
• 21 days to make a (new) habit.
• 21 days to reinforce (the new) habit.

So roughly 60 days or 2 months to go from ‘I’m going to do it’ to ‘If I don’t do it (my new habit) I’m going to miss it’.

60 days to make the change stick.

If we apply this to exercise and the oft talked up, ‘I’m going to get fit after Christmas’ pledge, it means that unless you are still fulfilling your New Years resolution by the end of February, you’re new regime won’t be anywhere near hardwired into your sub-conscious. It’s not that long, but how many of you have lasted till now with an exercise based (or any) New Years resolution?

If we apply this to the school year and getting kids into good exercise habits, this means roughly that it’s the end of Term 1 before they’re ‘in the groove’ (of course we know this applies to getting them into a class routine as well).

So how to build these good habits? Referring to last weeks post (‘Show Some Ticker’ – Read here), do a little more often so that the idea of exercise is not so daunting. 15-20 minutes with your heart-rate high enough to make the kids short of breath is spot on. In addition, make it fun (again, see last week’s post). It’s like hiding fruit in a smoothie – if it’s fun (or taste’s good) they won’t realise they’re working.

Have a great day!

The Year Ahead – Show Some Ticker

Welcome to 2012! Here’s hoping you had an excellent break. We have all returned to nothing close to Swimming Carnival quality weather that’s for sure!

Let’s take this opportunity at the start of the year to talk a little medium to long-term re the fitness and health of your students (and you).

I once heard tennis great Martina Navratilova say, that a bit of exercise several times a week is way better than one, intense hit out a week. With this simple, yet very effective piece of advice in mind, how about setting a goal to raise you student’s heart rate for a 15 minute period, 3 times a week (in addition to their PE Lessons)?

We're not talking marathons - just 15 minutes a few times a week.

There are a million different ways that you can achieve this and despite the jam-packed schedule of the average student and teacher, surely 15 minutes can be found.

For me, it’s all about heart rate. You’re not trying to build muscle on kids except the big one inside their chest, so getting the beats up and keeping them there for a sustained (this means games with no down time) 10-15 minutes is the best quality of exercise. Try these:

• Individual Skipping (not the big rope where a lot of waiting occurs).
• An extended game of Swim Fishy Swim, Stuck In The Mud or Octopus Tag (with limited time waiting at each end).
• Pac-man with a couple of  ‘angels’ (to release those who have been tagged).
• Everybody’s In.
• Relays with short laps (20 metres) and small teams (again, to reduce waiting and a slowing down of heart rates).

If the majority of the class is at least a little short of breath from about 5 minutes in until the end of 15 minutes, then you’ve set a great task. Remember, repetition of this style of exercise will have remarkable effects on their metabolism, fitness and overall health.

If you would like an explanation of any of the games above, please get in touch. If you have others you know of, how about leaving a comment?

Enjoy!

Rules of Engagement – Guest contributor Andrew Sun

This week we are lucky enough to have Director and Head Coach of Max Tennis, Andrew Sun, contributing on the all important topic of enaging students! Thanks once again Andrew!

Rules of Engagement

We can all remember our favourite teacher or coach as we were growing up and playing sport or going through our schooling journey. What was so memorable about how they taught you and the class? It was more than likely, that they made a good connection with you, they were engaging, and most importantly, their sessions were fun.

As teachers or coaches we are constantly trying to connect with or engage our students, no matter what the subject matter. However, the difference in the learning is often based upon how we “wrap up” or deliver the message.

Building Rapport with the students is critical in getting their trust which will make it easier for you to deliver your message. Take an interest in their lives, ask them what the highlight of their weekend was. If you know they play a particular sport, ask them how they went in their last match or congratulate them on an award they received at School Assembly.

When delivering your message, make it fun! If the kids are young, make a “funny sound” during your demonstration, for example “splaaat”, tell a bad “dad” joke, create relevant teaching points/cue words or simply make a funny facial expression during the activity. Ideally try and make it relevant based on your knowledge of the student’s personality, passed experiences and skill level. Keep in mind that listening to their responses and following their lead in regards to the jokes you tell & and demonstrations you give can really help to further engage the students.

Whilst it is important to make the session enjoyable, there still needs to be some structure and routine. Not only can this alleviate any safety concerns, it will give the students a sense of order and control, meanwhile assisting in developing a sense of security and self-discipline. It also shows your leadership skills and demonstrates your ability to maintain control of the class.

Another way to maintain order is to give your players a defined place to stand, such as the lines of the court or the field, for example “place your toes on this line”, while giving your explanations and demonstrations. Give them specific ways to hold their equipment (eg “give their racquet a hug” or “hide the soccer ball behind your feet on the ground”). This will also help minimize distractions.

There are many different ways you can demonstrate the skill you wish to teach:

• Teacher can use a student to demonstrate the skill whilst explaining the key components
• The teacher can demonstrate the skill with the aid of a student as a feeder.
• Have 2 students demonstrate the skill whilst the teacher explains the skills.

There are of course many approaches to engaging students too:

When explaining the skill, incorporate a Cue Word that highlights the main teaching point that you are teaching. You can create these cue words or the students could even create/change them during the demonstration/explanation – a great way to give them a sense of responsibility or ownership of the skill – assisting to further engage.

Throughout the session, utilize The Art of Questioning.  By using strategically timed questions, the student will be “forced to engage” with the session or activity. By questioning the students, it will encourage some thought processes and reinforcement of the relevant skills.

Additionally, include Little Goals during each activity. For example “how many can you do in 30 secs?”, “who can do 10 (kicks) first?”, “which pair can work together and do 3 lots of 10 first?”. All of these activities can be repeated with recognition (high fives) given for improving on their first attempt. With players given the opportunity to repeat the activity and improve on their previous score – they all win!!

Enjoy adding your own flavour to your sessions and experiment with what creates a great environment for your students.

Engage your students and have fun!!

Max Tennis is … Developing great people

Phone: +61 2 9029 8283 | Mob: 0417 412 231

Mail: asun@maxtennis.com.au | Web: www.maxtennis.com.au

www.facebook.com/MaxTennisAustralia

Clean Up Your Room!

The kids love the semi-chaotic nature of this game. Getting technical it really helps the basics of throwing with more power and catching under a bit of pressure.

Clean Up Your Room

1. Form two reasonably even teams (not the end of the world if they aren’t exactly the same)
2. Give each player 1 or 2 balls (for a fenced area) or bean bags (unfenced areas)
3. When you say ‘GO!’ players have to throw their ball / beanbag across to the opposition’s side of the court.
4. Allow the balls / beanbags to get thrown back and forth for a pre-determined amount of time.
   
5. NOW – 2 Really Important Rules
6. Players can only hold the ball for 5 seconds (wait until they work out that stockpiling the balls until the last 5 seconds before hurling them over to the other side is a great tactic – it’s always interesting to see how fast a class works this trick out. As soon as they do, introduce the 5 second rule)
7. Stop! means Stop! The game will be instantly ruined if kids keep hurling balls / beanbags over to the opposition after you have called stop. Explain at the start that even if they are about to throw, if they hear ‘STOP’ or ‘FREEZE’ they must do so. An automatic win to the other team usually only needs to be enforced once, to stop them throwing after the game has ended.
8. Count balls and beanbags up (including the one’s in the little fellas pocket or behind her back).
9. The team with the least balls / beanbags on their side wins.

Clean Up Your Room has evolved since it's inception in the 1940s.

Don’t forget to mention the fundamentals of good throwing. The two main elements being a side on position and moving weight forward as you throw the ball. For more info on these two all important aspects of throwing (and many other sports) check out our past blog on this topic here: https://teachersinsport.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/side-on-means-success-in-almost-every-sport/

Enjoy!

No Net Newcombeball – A Great Game to Reinforce Control!

Recently we talked about timing before power. As a progression onwards from that discussion we bring you a game that rewards control rather than power.

Derived from a Badminton modification (“Speed-minton”) we once saw, ‘No Net Newcombe-ball’ is a game that can be set up really quickly, modified to suit different standards and replicated to ensure that lots of ‘small sided’ games can be played at one time.

1) Use your own judgement to do the following:

• Form teams of 1 to 4 players.
• Mark a square out for each team with cones 1 to 5 metres in diametre.
• Space the square 1 to 10 metres apart.
• ‘How many, how big and how far’ the above is lets you control the difficulty of each game very easily.

2) Students now use Newcombe-ball rules (Volleyball with catching allowed) to play.

3) If ball is dropped, point is lost.

4) If ball lands outside the square without it being touched, point is lost.

5) First to ‘x’ wins.

Yet again, this game can be used across a multitude of sports and the fact that no net is required drastically reduces set-up time. Here’s a few sports NNN can be modified for:

• Volleyball
• Tennis (Either to teach control whilst Volleying or if for a rally, make the rule that players can’t step outside the square.
• Rugby (any type including Touch).
• AFL (Handpasses or Kicks).
• Netball (Passes of all kinds).
• Soccer (Increase the distance in-between squares to up the difficulty).
• Cricket or any throw and catch based game or skill.

There are no doubt others – free your teaching mind and get creative. Let us know how you go!

Enjoy!

Exercisers for Life – Encouraging a ‘Physical’ Education

I often wonder whether PE should even be called a subject. Practicalities aside, if there were three major things that a student could leave 13 years of schooling with it would be (in our opinion):

• The commonly referred to want to be a ‘lifelong learner’.
• An individual with empathy, community mindedness and an ability to interact well with society.
• A person with a desire to be healthy in mind and body.

All teachers are now trained and are given PL in topics that encourage the first two points regardless of subject. However, the third point and the one most pertinent to us at Teachers In Sport is often left  exclusively to the PE Teachers.

We have thankfully progressed from the day where a glossed over spelling error in a Geography class, or a mispronounced word in a Science lesson would yield the reaction ‘I’m not an English Teacher, I’m a Geography / Science Teacher!’. As we all know, we need to be teachers over and above ‘subject specific teachers’.  Producing well rounded, literate and numerically competent students is a responsibility we must ALL take on board.

Whole school exercise? Can it work?

So should this approach be taken to PE and healthy lifestyles? Perhaps slightly controversial and initially awkward to execute but yes, we think they should. Here’s some suggestions on how to deliver a more ‘physical’ education.

• Does your school have morning lines or an informal assembly? Make one or two year groups stay back each day for 10 minutes of light stretching or aerobic activity (see photo – this is basically what an enthusiastic, sporty teacher would have us doing in my primary school back in the 80’s).
• On a rotating basis (so that the missed time is shared amongst all lessons) allocate one period a day to contain 15 minutes of exercise.
• Have students take turns coming to class with a Stretch, Balance and Strength exercise (3 separate components) for the rest of the class. It can be done before recess, lunch or to break up an extended time in the classroom. The student who supplies the routine can also be asked to explain what each exercise is helping and improving.
• Find out what sport is being played in the student’s PE lessons and allocate time to practice and play it. This will help the kids reinforce skills learnt in their PE class. It also treats the PE lessons as a time for instruction and education with some time for practice rather than just ‘supervised play’ as can often occur during PE time.

Now we all know there’s never enough time in the day. It’s a fair and very valid point. However, shouldn’t exercise be non-negotiable? Further, when it comes to creating habits for life, if a student is used to the fact that exercise just happens several times a week and that’s the way it is, then there’s a way greater chance that they will take this excellent approach into adulthood.

Are we being too idealistic? Unrealistic? We’d love to know what you think. Why not leave a comment or join the conversation on Twitter where we’ve found so much great discussion to be occurring.

Enjoy the rest of week 1!!

Smartphones, Tablets and PE (Part 1) – Data Collection

PE is a mobile subject. So do mobile devices a welcome addition to the PE environment? Or are they just another gimmick?

Clipboards, reams of paper and their subsequent organisation / filing are the bane of many PE Teacher’s existence (certainly mine anyway). My most recent PE teaching assignment involved 29 classes a week. The teacher I was relieving for 6 weeks asked that I record all kids running times over 100m, in preparation for the Athletics carnival.

My first reaction was to grab the clipboard and request a roll printout for every class. I then paused and wondered how an iDevice, that constantly promises to make life easier (and to be fair, often delivers), could be utilised in this setting.

Using the free Evernote application (a list maker and keeper) and a stopwatch (an actual one not the iDevice version) I proceeded to record names and times of all kids running in a format that could easily be stored, edited, sorted (after pasting into Excel) and emailed. Here’s what ‘2A’s times looked like:

Not only was this a compact, flexible and editable way of recording times as a one off, it also meant no paper (and no need for transfer from paper to computer). Furthermore, it was a record that could be easily organised by name in order to compare results from week to week, term to term or year to year and therefore a clearer give a view of achievement or progress being made.

It got me thinking about the inclusion of these tools in a variety of PE lessons. Kids love quantitative measurement, so how about applying it to other parts of your lessons?

Make lists for:

1. (the dreaded) Beep Test
2. Soccer juggles
3. Baskets shot in a minute
4. ‘Self Rallies’ (Tennis)
5. Skipping skills
6. Any skill that can be repeated and counted that you can think of.

Record them, sort them, print them out and create an ongoing ‘ladder’ that kids can try and better their position on. See how it goes and let us know what you think!!!

The Littlies Love ‘Cone Flip’

Here’s a great game to get things started or finished in your lesson. It engages the kid’s bodies and brains as they try to devise a way to win. Like so many of these activities, there’s probably a million names. We call it ‘Cone Flip’.

In the absence of any relevant photo we thought we'd throw in a cheesy cartoon of some happy kids. Hoping yours are as smiley as this lot after a couple of games of Cone Flip 🙂

1. Acquire a set of cones or markers in two different colours.
2. Form two teams (one for each colour).
3. Spread cones out evenly (one for each player) across an area of your choice – The wider they are apart, the more active the kids will need to be.
4. On your command, the kids begin trying to flip the opposition’s cones from their upright position.
5. At the same time they have to return any of their flipped cones to their standing position.
6. The winner can be ascertained either when one team has flipped all the opposition’s cones or upon you saying so, stopping the game and counting which team has the most upright cones. They are then declared the winner.

As much as this game is great for the little ones we should revise that and say that it is great for anyone FROM a very young age. The older kids love it as well. It combines strategy and exercise very nicely.

Enjoy!!

Volleyball’s Too Hard – Newcombe Ball’s Too Easy: So Let’s Get Creative!

Volleyball and Newcombe Ball are both great sports, with the latter being an excellent modification that has proven very popular at school level.

We contest though that for many players (in our opinion, approximately 8 to 14 year olds), Newcombe Ball tends to be a little too easy and too bland. Whilst Volleyball, (even for inexperienced or lower ability adults), is often a game of on-going one shot rallies. Not much fun when you have 6 (or sometimes more) players per side waiting for a hit or their serve.

So let’s mix the two games up and see if we can’t custom make a hybrid version that will keep the kids engaged and improving at a more rapid rate. Shall we call it ‘Vewcombe-ball’ or ‘Newlley-ball’?? Maybe not…

Remember the following is not set in stone. You should modify your games in any way that results in more touches on the ball per player, an appropriate degree of difficulty for your players and finally, a platform for their improvement in the sport.

1. The serve must be hit (typically underarm).
2. If trying to encourage or teach overarm serves, how about a serve that can be hit overarm to a teammate who can then either dig it, catch and throw it, or just help it over the net anyway they can??
3. Modify the number of service faults allowed.
4. If 2 serves are missed allow the player to come half way up the court to throw / hit the final attempt.
5. Whenever the ball first crosses the net, it can be caught.
6. The catcher must pass the ball to a teammate (up to x passes must be made before returning it over the net).
7. The ball must go back over the net with a hit. To do this, a player tosses the ball up for the teammate to dig, set or spike it (more for advanced) back over the net. Alternatively the player intending to get the ball over the net can hit it out of their own hand.

In conclusion, all we encourage as general rule is: If the game is not keeping the kids busy and engaged then change the rules! Don’t be worried about how it may affect them in formal competition. As long as the fundamental skills that they are being asked to perform are correct (throwing, hitting and catching) then they will adapt when the rules become more formal.

Good luck!

First Timing, then Power

Have a look at anyone who is good at what they do in a sporting sense. The first thing that certainly comes to my mind is how effortless they look whilst generating, seemingly disproportionately large amounts of power. This ‘effortless power’ can be observed when an expert performs some of the following skills:

• A goalkeeper kicking the ball off the grass 50+ metres.
• A tennis player serving.
• A golfer hitting an iron (these days I feel that they look like they’re smashing the ball when they hit a wood or driver).
• A cricketer hitting a cover drive.

When these tasks are performed (and dozens of other skills), the relationship between power and timing is a very different one compared to your average junior player’s approach (especially boys!).

High on the priority list of your average junior players is to swing as hard and fast as is possible with little regard for the quality of contact. What must be understood is that genuine power cannot be achieved without great timing being in place first.

Try this tennis analogy as a means of explaining the importance of timing.

If you strike the ball in the imaginary 10 cm diameter circle in the slightly upper middle section of the strings you will achieve  power that I would rate a 9/10. However, if you hit the strings outside of the ‘sweet spot’ that rating plummets to 2-4/10 depending on how far off the sweet spot you make contact.

In addition, control is exponentially lost for every centimeter off the sweet spot that you make contact. Bad timing is therefore a two edged sword.

With these ‘power ratings’ in mind, here’s the question to ask your students: ‘Are you better off swinging fast and getting a 2-4/10 power score or swinging at a slow to moderate pace and get a 9/10 power score with the added bonus of control thrown in?’ Hopefully their response indicates an understanding of the topic.

To compensate for poor timing, most people swing faster. What they should be doing is slowing their swing down and trying to achieve regular, very good timing. The easy way to gauge this is when the task is performed and the ball feels as if it has barely hit the bat, racquet, foot etc.

When consistent, good timing is being achieved at a slow pace, it is then that a moderate amount of power can be added. If this causes timing to break down again then ratchet down the power.

First Timing, then Power!! – Teach to your kids (good luck with the teenage boys or adult males new to the sport!), practice the same approach with your own sport, marvel at the improvement. Best of luck!