Lesson video

Hello everybody welcome to this lesson on types of training.

This is from the Physical Training: Methods of Training Unit.

I'm Mr. Broome and I'm going to lead you through this lesson.

We've got a lot to cover here because there are so many different types of training that athletes and people like yourselves if you're involved in sport physical activity can use.

We're gonna learn all about them and their advantages and disadvantages and hopefully you'll learn something today that you can apply in your own training for your own sports or activities.

Lots of useful stuff coming up.

Let's have a look.

Okay, so by the end of today's lesson you should be able to describe the various methods of training and apply them to their most suitable activities and here are your keywords for today.

There are five, continuous training, circuit training, fartlek training, weight training, interval training, five different types of training amongst others that you'll learn about today.

Pause if you want to have a look at the definitions in more detail.

Today's lesson has three parts but there's an awful lot to cover.

The first is looking at how we can explain training for cardiovascular adaptation so let's get going.

So Sofia starts us off by asking "How might you train if you want to be able to perform just one action such as running for a long time" like in a marathon for example.

How would you approach that kind of training? What do you think? Well, activities which are the same action like running where you perform the same action repeatedly for a long duration such as running, but also falling into that category are cycling, rowing, and swimming.

These will all benefit from something called continuous training.

"You might say they're all aerobic activities," say Sofia because they all have plenty of oxygen when we perform them.

Here's some examples of this continuous training that we just mentioned.

Going for a long steady run, maybe outdoors or on a treadmill like the guy in the picture, could be going for a long bike ride or continuously rowing on a machine or in a boat.

The point being that we'll do these activities at a steady pace for at least 20 minutes.

So the pace doesn't change particularly, but preferably for 30 to 60 minutes and that's without any rest.

Now it's an aerobic activity, continuous training, which means that your heart rate will fall somewhere between 60 and 80% of the maximum heart rate or HR max while you're performing it.

Laura quickly asks, "Do you remember how to calculate maximum heart rate?" There is a small sum we can do to do so, it's 220 minus your age.

So for example, a 15-year-old would have a maximum heart rate of 220 minus 15, which equals 205.

That means their heart would be at the most 205 times in a minute.

So continuous training has its advantages and disadvantages as does every type of training we're going to look at today.

Let's very quickly look at those advantages so it can be very cheap and easily accessible.

For example, most people can go and run on the pavement outside their home.

It's great for endurance athletes.

So if you are particularly looking to become better at your endurance, cardiovascular endurance, then this is a great method of training and you can apply progressive overload quite easily by looking at how long you spent running for example, or cycling or rowing and then try to increase the time spent doing so or you might look at the pace that you did at and try and improve the pace in future.

Disadvantages are it's long in duration and repetitive and that can become quite boring to some people, me included, I struggle sometimes with continuous training because I find it difficult to engage in doing the same thing for such a long period of time and with repetitive actions that happen over and over and over again for long periods of time that can lead to overuse injuries such as runner's knee with runners.

Aisha and Izzy here in conversation here.

Aisha begins by saying, "Izzy you do a lot of running when you play rugby, maybe you should try continuous training" that would make sense wouldn't it if there's lots of running involved in rugby but Izzy counters up by saying "Yes, but I don't run at steady speeds all the time.

Sometimes I sprint, sometimes I jog, sometimes I even walk.

I wonder if there's a better way to train for that" than continuous.

And Izzy should try fartlek training.

"What-lek training" says Izzy, and rightly so.

This is a very unusual name isn't it, until you realize that fartlek is a Swedish word which means speed play, and fartlek training involves regular changes in speed.

It can also involve changes in terrain.

So you might run uphill, sometimes you might run downhill like the person in the picture.

Fartlek training could look something like this.

And this is just an example.

You might begin with a 200 meter jog, then sprint for 100 meters, then walk as a recovery for 50 meters, 100 meters jogging uphill and then a 20 meter sprint at the top of the hill.

That's an example of how you might do fartlek training, but you can mix and match.

The distances can change, you might differ it depending on the terrains that you have and so on and so forth.

And it can be be changed by increasing or decreasing the time, the speed, the intensity as required.

But the general look of these changes in speeds hopefully can be seen by this diagram.

So what are the advantages of fartlek training? Well it can be used to train both aerobically and anaerobically.

It's very easy again to use progressive overload because you might say, right, I'm not gonna walk 50 meters this time as a rest period.

I'm going to walk 40, and therefore reduce the amount of time spent resting.

Or you might increase the sprinting time by from 100 meters to to 150 meters to increase the intensity.

It's great for team sport players, a very important point because it reflects their sport.

So games like football, hockey, basketball possibly where the speeds are constantly changing, or fartlek training reflects that much better than continuous does.

Disadvantages of fartlek training while some people don't have access to different terrains to train on and it also requires some quite high intensity work at times running uphill or sprinting and you must, if you're going to get into an uncomfortable position of working at such high intensities, you must be highly motivated to repeatedly do that week after week.

Quick check for understanding, performance in which of these sports would benefit from using fartlek training the most? Is it A, hockey B, high jump or C, the 10,000 meters.

Well done if you said A, hockey.

Hockey because it's a game isn't it, where changes in pace are regularly done, whereas with high jump it's a very quick burst of energy and over in a short amount of time with no changes in pace and the 10,000 meters is generally very much a steady state activity where the same sort of speed is kept from the majority of the race.

Lucas has a little bit of a problem though so far we've talked about continuous and fartlek which don't really work for him.

He's a 200 meter runner, an event that could be over between 20 and 30 seconds and he needs to perform better in short bursts of anaerobic work.

What can he do? What do you think? Well, Lucas needs to be working in that anaerobic training zone as a 200 meter runner and that's 80 to 90% of his max heart rate and that's not something you can do for long periods of time.

You can't do continuous training of 20 minutes plus and expect to stay in the anaerobic training zone.

It just wouldn't work.

It's impossible.

So a great way for Lucas to achieve this is to use interval training in which shorts amounts of work are interspersed with periods of rest or low intensity exercise and it's those periods of rest or low intensity exercise which are intervals, okay? They're breaks in the training, and so therefore that's where we get the title, interval training.

Here's an example and it is just an example.

Lucas could do 30 seconds of sprinting followed by four minutes of rest and he could do that eight times.

That's just an example, we could play with the time so it's less sprinting and more rest for example.

So what are the advantages of interval training? Well it can be used to improve the efficiency of the anaerobic system much better than fartlek and certainly much better than continuous training.

So Lucas has found something here that he can use for his anaerobic system and improving his 200 meter performance that will improve his recovery time and his lactate threshold.

So it's an effective method of improving things like speed and power and can be used to improve various components of fitness with this principle of working and then resting with intervals.

The disadvantage though, well high intensity work periods like Lucas's training would not be suited to all, beginners, people in poor fitness and health conditions and it could cause injury.

It also requires a lot of motivation to perform the intense exercise such as Lucas's training sessions and therefore, you know, it takes a certain type of person to want to work that hard and they have to be highly motivated to do so.

Quick check for understanding.

The best method for training for a marathon runner would be interval training.

Is that true or false? That's false isn't it? And why is that false? Well, because as a long duration and endurance activity marathon running would not benefit as much from interval training as it would from continuous training which is a much better method for people who do long distance endurance events like marathon.

Interval could be of some benefit to help a marathon runner increase their speed, but it's not the best.

So that's why it was false.

Well done if you said false.

Here's the task A, this is the first task of today's lesson.

I would like you to look at Aisha and Jun who are each making a statement.

Aisha says "I want to improve my personal best in the 25 meter butterfly," which is one length of a normal pool as fast as you possibly can using the butterfly stroke.

And Jun says "I get tired during my basketball games and want to be able to play for longer." So these two students, Aisha and Jun are writing a personalized training plan for themselves but they're unsure whether they should use continuous, fartlek or interval and you are going to help them with your new knowledge.

Part one of the task is to select which training methods you believe is most suitable and write a sentence to justify your choice.

And part two is to write another sentence to explain why one of the other training methods wouldn't be as effective for them.

Pause the video here and write down your suggestions for Aisha and Jun and I'll be back in a moment with some suggested answers.

Okay, so Aisha said that she wants to improve her personal best in the 25 meter butterfly.

What might you have said about Aisha? Well the best method from the three that we've looked at so far today would be interval training.

That's because the 25 meter butterfly is an anaerobic event and she can improve the efficiency of her anaerobic system with high intensity interval workouts.

Fartlek training on the other hand would not benefit Aisha as much.

Her event doesn't require those frequent changes of speed, just a maximal effort at top speed.

So you might have chosen fartlek training as one to say wouldn't be suitable.

Continuous training also wouldn't be suitable for Aisha.

She doesn't need that steady state long period of time.

She needs fast, quick bursts of exercise which is gonna improve her anaerobic system and interval training is definitely the best for that.

In terms of Jun, Jun could use fartlek training as it mimics the changes in intensity finding basketball games.

We need to make it specific to their needs, don't we? But also interval training is also quite similar to the end-to-end, stop start nature of basketball where you might very quickly move up or down the court but then be in a fairly stationary position for a short amount of time while you attack or defend and then have to run back down to the other end of the court.

And interval training kind of replicates that as well.

So saying either of those would've been acceptable.

What we wouldn't really advise Jun to do is continuous training, exercising for 20 minutes or more because although he is looking for cardiovascular endurance, interval and fartlek are much closer in terms of the needs for basketball.

Well done if you gave Aisha and Jun some good advice there.

The second part of today's lesson looks at how we can explain training for muscular adaptations rather than cardiovascular.

Let's take a look.

So here's Paul.

And Paul can do five press-ups before his pectorals get tired and he can't do anymore.

And the question says, how could training help him improve his press-up performance? Well there's something we need to know first, does Paul want to improve his muscular endurance or his muscular strength? And if it's muscular endurance, then that would mean he could do more press-ups than he currently can, so if he focused on endurance training, Paul could work maybe towards being able to do 50 continuous press-ups rather than 5.

But if he chose to go down the strength route, that would mean he could perform with stronger pectorals and for example if he did strength training instead Paul could work towards doing five clap press-ups.

Now Aisha here with a note to say, "Remember, the word for an increase in size and strength of the muscle is," gives you chance to fill the word in, hypertrophy.

Well done if you remember that.

Weight training is one of the ways which we can achieve adaptations in the muscles in fact it's the main way that we change our muscles to be either more suitable for muscular endurance or for muscular strength.

And we'll use things like kettlebells, dumbbells, resistance machines and barbells to do so you may even use your own body weight and one of the important measures we can use to help us structure the way we do weight training, is a person's 1 rep max.

Now Alex says, "What is a 1 rep max?" And that's a good question it's something that's important to know before we move on.

Do you know already? So a 1 rep max means the maximum amount of weight a person can do in a particular lift in just one repetition.

Okay, so they don't have to do a second repetition.

In fact, they couldn't do a second repetition, that's the point.

Let's take the example on the left of bicep curl.

So what's the most that person can hold in their hand and still manage to curl it up just once to achieve their 1 rep max.

And if they tried to do just a kilogram more they wouldn't be able to lift it, then we would know what their 1 rep max is.

And if we're training for muscular endurance, we would look at using low weights and that's less than 70% of the 1 rep max, but higher repetitions, so 12 to 15 reps per set.

With muscular strength on the other hand we'd be looking at losing a higher weight, so something above 70% of the 1 rep max, but maybe you've worked this out already, we would use lower repetitions.

So something like the four to eight repetition range.

With that in mind, here's the check for understanding.

Aisha's 1 rep max on the squat is 100 kilograms and she wants to improve her muscular endurance.

Which of these is most suitable? Is it A, three sets of 50 kilograms for 14 reps? B, three sets of 100 kilograms for 1 rep or C, 3 sets of 80 kilograms for 5 reps.

Which do you think? Well done if you said A, why was it A? Well, 50 kilograms really fits into the idea of muscular endurance and for muscular endurance we need to be doing less than 70% of her 1 rep max and 50 kilograms is well below 70%.

It's also the rep range at 14 that we would expect for muscular endurance, whereas B and C, are quite heavy weights, they're both above 70% and they're also only small rep ranges.

So well done if you rule those out based on their reps or their weights, they are certainly more for muscular strength.

Now there's a warning for anybody who wants to get involved in weight training and first of all it can be dangerous and lead to serious injuries.

Before weight training, we should look at safe practice when using weights and use the correct lifting technique.

We might also use something called a spotter, which is somebody who will help if the performer struggles and they'll also check the correct technique or form is being used to try to avoid injuries.

Lifting heavy weights can be a seriously dangerous activity, very beneficial in terms of the adaptation to muscles, but it should also be done under caution of how dangerous it can be.

What the advantages of weight training well it can be adapted to improve muscular endurance or strength, you can target very specifically muscles that you want to train with various different lifts and it can be very easy to monitor progressive overload, very numbers-based, you can increase the kilograms or the number of reps in future.

Disadvantages, as we've already said, high risk of injury if you have incorrect technique or you use too much weight.

And also equipment for lifting weights or gym membership can also be quite expensive so it's not always accessible for everybody.

A second type of training that you might try and use for muscular adaptations is something called plyometrics, and that involves exercises such as bounding or depth jumps or box jumps as you can see here.

And this method helps to develop the explosive capability of the muscle, i.

e.

, because we have here strength being developed but also at speed, which equals power, strength times speed equals power.

Laura's here very quickly to say "A training method for activities requiring powerful movements, what might they be?" What can you think of? Maybe pause a video here.

Here's some of mine.

Some examples could be a goalkeeper.

Now they have to leap across the goal to make a save.

They need that explosive powerful movement.

A high jumper needs as much explosive power as they possibly can to send their body over the bar, and a gymnast performs lots of acrobatic movements with which require explosive powerful movements.

Quick check for understanding which of these photos best demonstrates training using plyometrics, is it A, B or C? Well done if you said C because A is some sort of traditional kinda weight training, certainly not plyometrics.

B is yoga or Pilates and C chose somebody using hurdles to do some leaping or bounding, some sort of plyometric exercise which is going to improve power.

Well done if you said C.

Let's have a closer look at what happens in plyometrics.

So what happens here is that the muscle that's being worked goes from an eccentric contraction, which means it's been lengthened to a concentric contraction, which means it's been shortened in a very quick space of time.

So just remember it's that combination of the strength required to leap or bound or box jump or something like that, plus the speed at which the movement happens and the speed at which you go from that eccentric contraction to a concentric contraction that helps us to develop power.

And typically you do sort of 12, 15 reps of something like a leap or a bound.

So how about plyometric training advantages? Well, it's a really effective method for improving power.

If you wanted to increase your vertical jump for example, it's something you could use for that and it requires very little equipment in fact you could do a plyometric session without any equipment at all.

Disadvantages, however, well it's not the type of training that somebody should do off the back of having done no training before.

You must have a good foundation of strength and conditioning before you can go into plyometrics.

And so it does take time to work yourself up towards being able to do so, and that's because there's a high chance of injury for people who are not in good condition if they're going to go and perform those explosive movements that we do in plyometrics.

Here's the practice task for this section.

Laura and Sofia both have the same 1 rep max on the bench press of 50 kilograms. Remember the bench pressure lying back, you're pushing the weight straight up.

It specifically targets the pectorals and some triceps as well involved there.

And Laura says that she wants to improve her strength so that she can send her passes further in netball.

So that action will be important there.

And Sofia says that she wants to improve her muscular endurance so that she doesn't get tired in boxing sessions and again, that action is performed a lot in boxing.

Now what I'd like you to do is first of all do some number crunching.

I'd like you to calculate how the bench press could be used as part of an effective weight training session to achieve the different aims that Laura and Sofia have.

How many sets of reps should they do, what weight should they use? Second part of the task is to think about progressive overload and think about the second weight training session after the first one that you've calculated.

How might that differ to make sure that they are progressively overloading and making progress? Pause video here and have a go at those number-crunching tasks.

Okay, so Laura wants to improve her strength.

So first of all we know her 1 rep max is 50 kilograms and that to increase the strength of the muscle she needs to be doing a weight of more than 70% of her 1 rep max, which is 35 kilograms or above.

And we know that the rip range for strength is around four to eight.

So things you might have said, well in week one she could bench press 40 kilograms. That falls into the correct range for three sets of five.

Again, the repetition range falls into that four to eight repetition range that we look for for strength.

Then in week two, the second part of the sec, the, then in week two, the second part of the task, she might continue with 40 kilograms but look to add a repetition or she might look to increase the weight and keep the same number of repetitions.

Either way, she has made some progressive overload on her body.

The body's doing more than it did in the previous session, so we might increase reps, we might increase weight.

What you'll notice is it hasn't gone up by a huge amount and try not to overestimate just how much you can improve in a week.

One rep more or five kilograms more is absolutely fine.

In Sofia's case, she was muscular endurance.

She got the same 1 rep max, which means 35 kilograms is 75, which means that 35 kilograms is the 70% mark and we need to be under that for muscular endurance and a rep range of 12 to 15.

So you might have said in week one she might bench press 25 kilograms for three sets of 12, 25 kilograms and 12 repetitions fall within the ranges that we need for muscular endurance.

In week two to achieve progressive overload, she might increase that weight by a little bit up to 28 kilograms and keep the repetitions at 12.

Or she might have kept the weight at 25 kilograms and gone for 14 repetitions.

Either way, she's doing a little bit more than she did the week before and therefore achieving progressive overload.

Well done if for both Laura and Sofia, you correctly got their weights and their reps and everything that needs to be done within the correct range depending on their goal of muscular strength or muscular endurance.

Well done if for both Laura and Sofia you managed to get them a session that fit within the correct ranges depending on whether they want to increase their muscular endurance or their muscular strength and that in the second week you noted a slight increase in either weight or repetitions to achieve progressive overload.

That brings us to the third section of today's lesson, which is explain circuit training and HIIT, or H-I-I-T.

So have a look.

Circuit training is something I'm sure lots of you have done before, maybe in even in a PE lesson.

In circuit training, participants spend a certain amount of time at a station and then move to the next station usually with a bit of rest in between and so on and so forth, and continue to do that until they've done all the stations.

Look something like this station 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and back to the start.

Here's an example of circuit training with some actual activities.

So glute bridge, skipping, dumbbell, lateral raises, press-ups, tuck jumps, and some mobility work on the shoulders there.

Now this circuit that I've just shown you is used for training multiple different components of fitness in the same session.

So if we look at those activities, while skipping will help cardiovascular endurance, the lateral raises will help strengthen muscular endurance depending on how many reps as we've already seen with weight training and so on.

And you can see there's the the leaping action there will help power, the mobility work will help flexibility and so on.

So different components of fitness within the same session.

Here's a check for understanding then.

Which of these circuit training stations would benefit the performer's cardiovascular endurance? Is it A, glute bridges, B, shuttle runs or C, lunges? Well done if you said B, shuttle runs, yes, shuttle runs will help to improve cardiovascular endurance whereas glute bridges and lunges are much more muscular based or maybe muscular strength or muscular endurance.

Now circuit training is a very adaptable method of training that's one of its major strengths.

We can target one component of fitness or several within the same circuit as we've seen earlier.

We can easily add or reduce time spent at a station so if you're doing 30 seconds at a station next week you might do 40 seconds at a station to achieve progressive overload.

Same with rest you might start with a minute of rest and bring it down to 50 seconds of rest next time you do it.

Include more or less stations as required okay? That's a strength for perhaps if your group size is actually rather big, you could add more stations to fit more people in.

It's almost limitless number of stations you can add.

And you can add variations of exercises for different ability levels so if you imagine one of your stations is let's say the squat, you can have different versions of the squat so people can access different difficulty levels.

Lucas says "This circuit is tailored to develop one component of fitness" which one is it maybe pause here and look at all the different activities and think which component of fitness would this circuit training session particularly target? Well, it's muscular strength or endurance, we don't quite know because we don't know how long is going to be spent and how many reps is going to be spent at each station but it's a muscular strength or endurance station.

So as said earlier, we can sometimes have circuit training, which is just based on developing one component of fitness.

So circuit training advantages, very adaptable as we've said, can be tailored to all sorts of different things, including maybe one component of fitness as with Lucas's example just now or a mixture of components of fitness.

It's easy to achieve progressive overload because we are timing how long people spend at each station or how long they have for rest.

And we can play with those numbers.

You can also have a lot of people working at the same time.

Let's say you have a rather large group of people who all want to do a fitness training session.

A circuit is an ideal way to manage lots of people in the same room.

The disadvantages of that as well if you do have a large group it can require a lot of space particularly if you do things like shuttle runs as part of the stations.

And it's not ideal if you want to train one action continuously for an extended period of time.

If you are training for a marathon, circuit training isn't going to be a great idea because you want to be doing the same action repeatedly for a long period of time where circuit training expects you to move on quite fairly quickly onto another activity and so if that's your aim circuit training perhaps isn't for you.

Alex says "Have you ever heard of HIIT, H-I-I-T," and if you have "What does it stand for?" Well, it stands for high intensity interval training.

It's a type of interval training which we've looked at already so we know what intervals are by now, in which short and intense periods of work are followed by short rest periods.

So that's the difference really if we think about Lucas's sprint training session early you had four minutes of rest, you wouldn't get four minutes of rest in a HIIT session.

The rest periods are rather short.

Heart rate will be over 80% of your max heart rate.

Here's an example of how it might look or it is an example it can be done slightly different.

So we might have 30 seconds of work followed by 30 seconds of rest on repeat until the end.

It might be that you do 40 seconds of work and 20 seconds of rest or a minute of work and 30 seconds of rest, you know as long as the windows of work and rest are short.

So what are the advantages of HIIT training? Well, it's become very, very popular in recent years and one of the reasons for that is that short in duration, so people who don't have a huge amount of time to do a great big training session for an hour or more can use HIIT to get lots of the benefits of training, but in a much shorter space of time because you are squeezing all that work into very high intensity short session.

Disadvantages are that it's a high-intensity activity.

It's not necessarily suitable for some people with certain medical conditions to be working at that high intensity.

And as with some of our other activities earlier in the lesson, when you have a high-intensity requirement, it does take a certain level of motivation to be able to repeatedly perform HIIT training sessions and get into that perhaps uncomfortable position of having your heart working almost as hard as it can.

Here's the task, the final task of today's lesson on circuit training and HIIT, well, we're gonna focus on circuit training and I'd like you to think about the components of fitness that are required by rugby players and then design a five-station circuit which would benefit rugby players, okay? Specifically tailored towards rugby players.

I'd like you to first of all write the name of the exercise for each station.

Then next to that, write the component of fitness targeted at that station.

And then finally, briefly explain why the circuit you've created is suited to rugby players and how they will benefit from each station.

Okay, three parts to that.

Pause video here, write out your five-station circuit and then come back to me in a minute for my suggested answers.

Okay, so how might your five-station circuit have looked and of course it's not gonna look exactly like mine but along the lines of mine.

So station one, I've chosen press-ups to improve muscular strength.

So I've said the activity and the component of fitness.

Station two, shuttle runs for cardiovascular endurance.

Station three, Russian twists for muscular strength, station four, bounding for power and station five, squats for muscular strength.

Why do I think that was a good idea to create my five-station circuit for rugby players in this way well I believe this is suitable for rugby because it's a sport which requires a lot of strength so I focus largely on strength, press-ups for pushing past opposition players, Russian twists to help with the passing action that we have in rugby, and squats to develop leg strength ready for scrummaging.

I think the bounding sessions which improve power will help when we are running with the ball trying to score a try.

And the cardiovascular endurance from the shuttle runs will help to be able to last the entire game without tiring.

Well done if your circuit looks something similar with stations that are really focused on the needs of rugby players.

And that brings us to the end of today's lesson.

We're just gonna go through a summary, read along with me.

Training to improve fitness can take many forms depending on the goal to be achieved and the components of fitness to be improved.

Cardiovascular improvements can be achieved by using continuous fartlek interval training methods.

Muscular adaptations can be achieved with weight training and we can adapt weights and repetitions to suit whether we want to improve strength or endurance.

Plyometrics can also be used to increase muscular power.

Circuit training is an adaptable method which can target numerous components of fitness if required.

And HIIT is a method of interval training with short bursts of intense work and short rest periods.

Okay so thanks for joining me for today's lesson I really hope that you learned a lot there and I hope maybe you even took something from it that you can apply to your own training, perhaps today you discovered a type of training that you hadn't heard of before, that now you can apply into your own training sessions that might improve your fitness and your performance for your own sport or physical activity.

I really hope that is the case.

In the meantime, I'll look forward to seeing you in another lesson.

Bye-bye.