Fitness For Health

Athletes need to be in the best possible condition when competing in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. They have personal fitness coaches to support them at every stage. They follow exercise and training regimes and eat balanced, healthy diets to ensure they are at their peak for the biggest sporting event of their lives.

However not only Olympic athletes should follow training and exercise regimes. The following learning activities guide your pupils to explore, in a practical way, the activity recommendations for health. They also support the statutory requirements within the Key Stage 3 PE framework and provide a pathway to pupils developing their own four to six week activity profile. You could deliver this activity as part of a discrete unit focusing on Developing Personal Fitness for Health. This activity also links with the Health and Fitness classroom activity.

Lesson 1

Warm Up Activity:

A gateway game in pairs using Basketball skills

Organise your pupils into pairs with one basketball and two cones. Each pair lays out two cones to make a gate. Using dribbling and passing skills, each pair must visit five gates and:

• make five passes through each gate;
• pass the ball around the body through each gate; and
• pass the ball up and over the body through the gate as quickly as possible.

Development

Dribble and Pass

Give each pair an Activity Card so there is one card at each gate. Each card has an activity and a number of points awarded for that activity.

Your pupils must move from gate to gate, still dribbling the ball and making five passes at each gate, to accumulate points.

Challenge your pupils to gain as many points as possible in one minute.

Ask your pupils which activities scored the least/most points. Why do they think this was? (The activities with least points were the most inactive and the activities with the most points were the most active.)

Challenge your pupils to score 60 points as quickly as possible!

Ask your pupils why there was a 60 point target for this challenge. What do the points represent? The 60 points represent 60 minutes. This is the recommended time that young people should exercise each day.

As well as how many minutes they should exercise every day, what else might your pupils need to know about being physically active for health? Encourage them to consider how hard they have to exercise and how it should feel to exercise at the right intensity.

To improve our personal fitness for health we should exercise for 60 minutes per day at a moderate intensity.

Basketball Circuit

This activity aims to investigate the intensity of exercise required to improve personal fitness for health. Ask your pupils to complete a basketball circuit, working as hard as they can at each station.

Organise your pupils into four groups. Put a group in each of the specified coloured areas: red, yellow, orange and blue. Each coloured area represents a different activity:

• Red = 3v3 possession game
• Yellow = dribbling practice
• Orange = fast break practice
• Blue = shooting practice

Each group must organise their own equipment and activity by following the information on their Circuit Card. Allow your pupils two minutes to set the activity up.

Give each pupil three minutes to work non-stop at their respective activity. After each activity ask your pupils to rate the intensity of the exercise for them as individuals on a scale of 1 to 10. They should record their findings on their Evaluation Worksheet.

Rotate the groups until all your pupils have completed all the activities.

Encourage group discussion about the different intensities the pupils experienced. Facilitate whole-class feedback by asking why it is important to understand what moderate intensity activity feels like.

Guide your pupils towards a discussion about levels of fitness and amounts of exercise. Emphasise that moderate intensity exercise can be different for everyone and the important point is to understand how moderate intensity feels for you as an individual.

Your pupils should now be aware that they should exercise for 60 minutes per day at a moderate intensity to meet the daily recommendations for exercise for health. It is important to make your pupils aware that they can build their 60 minutes up throughout the day and that they do not need to complete them in one session.

Lesson 2

Warm up activity:

Organise any simple aerobic warm up.

Development

Divide the class into three groups. Allocate each group a coloured area, comprising four different exercises/activities listed on the Area Exercises. Each activity is either a conditioning exercise or a whole body activity. Take your pupils through each exercise, highlighting safe technique.

Your pupils must organise themselves so that each member of the group completes each activity for one minute before moving on to the next exercise in their area. They must decide whether the whole group completes the same exercise at the same time or each group member completes a different activity each time.

After each exercise, ask your pupils to consider whether the activity is a conditioning exercise or a whole body activity.

Once your pupils have experienced each exercise in their initial area, ask the whole group to move on to the next coloured area. They then try a new set of exercises until each group has visited all three areas.

As a group, your pupils must decide whether the exercises in the area they finish at are conditioning exercises or whole body activities. Write two headings on a board, ‘Conditioning Exercises to Improve Muscle Tone’ and ‘Whole Body Activity to Improve Cardiovascular Fitness’. After a group discussion, ask your pupils to put their answers on sticky notes and place them under the appropriate heading.

Use a ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ exercise to discover whether the class agrees with each group’s decisions.

Your pupils should now be aware of different exercises/activities that they can include in their 60 minutes exercise per day. They should also understand the importance of including a balance of aerobic and muscular exercise in their daily activity.

Lesson 3

Warm-up Activity: Aerobic card game

Lay out a deck of cards face down in the centre of the gym. Explain to your pupils that each wall represents a suit of cards and an exercise, for example:

• Clubs = skipping
• Hearts = jumping jacks
• Spades = step ups
• Diamonds = scissor jumps

Ask your pupils to select a card and go to the allocated area to complete the exercise, repeating it for the number on the card, for example the eight of diamonds = 8 scissor jumps.

• Ace = 1
• Jack = 11
• Queen = 12
• King = 13
• Joker = run one circuit of the gym

Ask your pupils to work for five to six minutes. Play music to motivate them.

Development: Jigsaw Activity

Organise your pupils into groups of three and give each group one Stretch Resource Card. They must learn to perform the stretch using the resource cards so that they feel able to teach another pupil later in the lesson.

Lead the class through a variety of short aerobic activities, for example:

• Activity 1: Bib Tag
• Activity 2: Team Chase the Bib
• Activity 3: Bench Ball Game

Ask each group to number themselves 1, 2 or 3. Reorganise the class so that all number ones are working together, all number twos are working together, etc.

Each member of the group must lead the others through their individual stretches, so that each group completes a set of stretches (there should be a maximum of six).

Cool down and follow this by asking the groups to stretch together, using the pupil-led stretches.

Plenary Session with Pupils

Discuss the importance of flexibility and ask the following key questions:

• Why is flexibility important for our health?
• What type of exercise would you recommend to someone who wants to improve flexibility? Can you give some examples?

Pupils should now be aware of different flexibility exercises/activities that they can include in their 60 minutes exercise per day. They should also understand that it is important to include a balance of aerobic, muscular and flexibility exercise in their daily activity.

Personal Activity Profile

Now that the pupils have a good understanding and experience of the range of exercise required for health benefits, set them a task to develop their own four to six week activity profile, detailing:

• how much exercise/activity they take daily (in minutes);
• what type of activity/exercise they take daily (aerobic/muscular/flexibility exercise); and
• how the exercise felt.

They could also extend the profile to include diet.

At the end of the designated period, ask your pupils to evaluate whether they met the health recommendations during that time.