With a summer of professional sport kicking off this month including sailing at the America’s cup, golf at the US Open, the British and Irish Lions tour, the Tour de France, Wimbledon and the IAAF world championships among many more sporting events, there’s an opportunity for us all to be inspired to kick start our own fitness plans and achieve our personal training goals as well as being entertained with so much sporting prowess on display.
With so many professional sporting icons hoping to reach their optimum performance level in these coming events, what can we learn from them that we can apply to our own training?
Professional athletes will follow a periodised training programme that is tailored to ensure they reach their peak performance levels in time for competition. A variety of elements are crucial to ensuring their training programme provides them with the skills and fitness need to succeed, this can include strength and conditioning training, speed and agility work, flexibility training, sports nutrition advice and support, and sport psychology and coaching. A key element in developing the training support required is understanding what areas of strength and weakness already exist and using this indispensable data to develop a tailored programme that is not only specific to the athletes’ sport, but personalised to their requirements. This series of assessments enables the support team and coaches to benchmark where an athlete is and provide feedback and compare progress over the duration of the training plan being executed.
In order to do this, athletes take part in a series of comprehensive fitness tests that include measuring VO2 max to determine cardiorespiratory fitness, lactate threshold testing, flexibility testing, body composition analysis, isokinetic strength testing to determine muscular strength and endurance and power output analysis among many more. These tests include a mix of invasive and non-invasive tests to provide a thorough data set for analysis, which can then be used to develop an individual’s training programme that focuses directly on the areas that the most time should be spent. By regularly retesting in these areas, athletes are continually motivated to stay focused on their training and able to track their progress towards their short and medium-term goals in the build up to competition.
So, what does this mean for the rest of us?
The ACSM recommend regular fitness assessments to support the development of individualised training programmes which include the measurement of body composition, cardiorespiratory fitness, flexibility, muscular strength and muscular endurance.
Technology is revolutionising the fitness industry and fitness testing is no exception. Ordinarily, a comprehensive fitness test covering all areas of fitness would need to be conducted in a sports science lab and could take anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes to complete, with some tests taking even longer to provide the results.
With FitQuest, you can measure 8 different areas of fitness using 5 tests in a total of just 4 minutes. The areas of fitness measured include motor sensory control, lower body explosive power, lower body strength, lower body endurance, upper body strength, upper body endurance and cardiovascular fitness. With such detailed analysis, the information provided by a 4 minute FitQuest test can provide indispensable support for the development of a personalised training plan for anyone who completes the test.
FitQuest is a state of the art concept in fitness measurement that brings full biomechanical lab technology right into the heart of any gym or facility, enabling everyone from the newcomer to exercise to the professional athlete to access invaluable data to help them track their progress and achieve their goal whether that is increasing their fitness, completing an event for the first time, getting a personal best or winning a sporting event! Whatever the goal, measurement is crucial to helping people along their way to achieving success.
Whatever your sporting preference, enjoy watching all the sporting events lined up this summer and here’s to achieving your goals!
Contact us here to find out more about how measurement can be used to support your members.
