The 5 Components of Physical Fitness
How well you "score" in the 5 components of physical fitness will largely determine your sporting outcomes.I'll base my examples on surfers, seeing as we're all about surfing here at Surftweeter.com.
As mentioned on my page about the importance of physical fitness, there are actually 8 components of physical fitness that affect surfing performance.
They are
- Cadiovascular Fitness
- Muscular strength
- Muscular endurance
- Flexibility
- Body Composition
- Balance
- Agility
- Power
Cardiovascular
Fitness
As discussed on the cardiovscular fitness page, it's how efficiently your body is able to transport nutrientsand oxygen to, and remove wastes from, your working muscles....as a result you'll be able to paddle harder, faster, and for a longer duration, dependent on how you specifically train.
This is improved mostly through aerobic exercise.
Muscular Strength:
Muscular
Strength
Having greater muscular strength will mean you will be able to do more powerful bottom turns, snaps and other power moves...you'll throw more water! You'll also be able exert more force with each paddling stroke and therefore be able to paddle harder.
Muscular endurance:
This is the ability of your muscles to sustain repeated contractions or one contraction over a period of time.
Muscular endurance activity-crouching in the
barrel
This is important for effective paddling, pumping down the line,
or generating speed on the wave face by working your board;
Also, the ability to stay in a compressed or crouched position (tube riding) for a period of time.
Flexibility:
Probably the most neglected of the first 5 components of physical fitness-
Extreme Flexibility
This is the Range of Motion (ROM) a joint or joints can move through. It's really important for good posture, joint stability, coordination and balance.
Flexibility is limited by tight tendons and muscles surrounding a joint and by stiff ligaments connecting the bones that make up a joint.
On this site we recommend a number of ways to improve flexibility, including Yoga, PNF stretching, static stretches etc - see our Flexibility pages for specific routines you may wish to try.
It's a no-brainer that it's important to be really flexible for high performance surfing. (just think of the positions we put ourselves in......but not quite like this extreme flexibility picture!!)
Body Composition:
Body composition refers to the amount of muscle, fat, water and bone in the body.
As surfers and sports people we know that fat is "dead weight" on our backs...and if you're carrying extra fat, it's going to be detrimental to your performance levels.
If you have any trouble understanding this, simply pick up two 5kg dumbells , and go for a 5 km run with them! ...even better, somehow strap 10kgs of weights around your waist, and then go for a surf!
Balance:
Having good balance is really important for surfers, because our boards are constantly moving under us. We are constantly adjusting our balance as we surf.
Good balance is largely affected by core strength and the muscle groups in the legs.
Balance can be significantly enhanced by doing stability exercises, improving our leg strength and improving our core strength.
Agility:
Agility
Training
It stands to reason that a surfer needs to be agile to perform aerial manouvers, 360's , floaters, make late take-offs etc.
Power:
This is the ability of a muscle or muscle group to exert a maximum amount of force in the shortest period of time.
Power
Move
VERY important for surfers...think of your bottom turns, decimating the lip, driving down the line...it sure helps to be able to deliver force through our legs, to our surfboards, very quickly.
Think of paddling to get into position for a wave.... the quicker you are able to apply a lot of force against the water withy your hands/arms, the faster you're going to be able to paddle!
5
components of Physical Fitness
.... and to be high performance surfers, we need to pay attention to including all 8 components in our training routines.
