Professional Documents
Culture Documents
4º Eso PL
4º Eso PL
The warm-up exercises prepare the body physically and mentally for a better performance in a
posterior effort and give you protection against injuries.
Benefits of warming-up
Physiological:
Starting a physical work suddenly has been proved to decrease the blood level that enters
the heart in the first seconds of activity, which involves a high risk, mostly for undertrained
people.
However, if we start a physical activity with a warm-up, we get all the systems of our body
(cardiovascular, respiratory, locomotor, nervous…) to start working in a progressive way, and
blood will flow properly through the circulatory system. That will provide enough oxygen to
the circulatory system, and nutritients in order to satisfy the improving demand due to the
increasing of activity.
In addition, muscles will improve their temperature, a fact that helps the muscular contraction
(due to the decreasing of the intramuscular viscosity) and facilitates enzyme activity.
Psycological:
All our body systems respond as a unit. In this way, during warm-up our nervous system will
adapt for the subsequent effort, allowing the individual to get focused, decreasing the anxiety
and minimizing the possibility of accidents or injuries.
It is very important that you are concentrated in the physical activity and let outside the gym
all your troubles or thoughts, to make the best of your work.
Types of warm-up
Usually, we start with a general warm-up (of all parts of our body) to continue with a specific
one, that depends on the kind of sport or physical activity that we will do later. However, we
will consider both as indivisible one from another in a correct warm-up. In other words, we
first have to do a general warm-up and later a specific one, based on the exercise that we are
going to work in class.
Effects of warm-up
Besides, there are some further characteristics that there should be included in a correct warm-up:
- Complete (we must work all the parts of the body)
- Progressive (keeping an order – head to feet or viceversa).
- Enough duration.
- Miscellaneous (different exercises)
Endurance
Endurance is the most important physical ability due to the long term adaptations that its
training produces:
• Cardiovascular system: Cardiac hypertrophy, decreasing heart rate, increasing
hemoglobin levels (fundamental for the oxygen transport).
• Locomotor system: Better energy utilization and more capillarization of the muscles.
But all the physical exercises do not have the same purposes or effects in the human body. We
have to keep in mind that we are at school, and we have to be focused on our health.
We have two crucial concepts: Duration and intensity.
The duration is the time we spend excercising and the intensity is the grade of effort of our
training.
To calculate the appropiate intensity, we could use the aerobic threshold concept, as a
“virtual” area that our work must reach in order to be effective (Training number 2, 60-80% of
our maximum heart rate), but we should not overtrain (training number 3) or not train hard
enough (weak stimulus: training 1)
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Training 1 Training 2 Training 3
The most important training methods are divided in two big groups:
• Continuous training:
Involves training for long periods where the intention is that your heart rate stays in your
training zone
- Continuous running involves running with moderate intensity with an
extended duration without rest intervals, keeping the same running pace.
- Fartlek involves running different speeds over different terrains for a long
period of time, changing the speed during the work.
• Discontinuous training:
- Circuit training. We work in stations, going to the next one when the
established time is over. While we are rotating, we rest.
Speed
- Reaction speed: moving as fast as you can after the referee blows the whistle in a
100m sprint. In team sports there is also reaction speed: chasing your opponent
when he runs away from you, or reacting to a volleyball spike quickly.
o In the reaction speed, there some variables: Position, sense…
Some aspects that you have to consider when you are working the speed ability:
- Type of muscle fiber.
- Stimulus transmission speed.
- Motivation and concentration.
- Warming up.
- Fatigue.