Keeping up appearances- a summer fitness guide!

Ultimate combines lots of different types of fitness in order to create the sport we play. The main areas of fitness and how to exercise them are:

1. Cardiovascular endurance: This is what keeps you going over an entire weekend of continuous ultimate (or there about). This is what keeps you running and chasing down every disc even (and especially) in the last game where it will be most important. A good way to keep your stamina up over the summer is doing a long cardio workout once or twice a week (depending on the amount of time you have available to you). This can be cycling, jogging or probably the best option which is swimming. Swimming lengths is a great cardio workout and it also trains all of the muscle groups as well, improving your stamina all over the body.
2. Agility: This is the backbone of ultimate. If you aren’t agile enough, you won’t get free of your mark, you will waste energy trying to get free and (if we turn) not be able to keep up on defence. This fitness is linked to your sprint speed and acceleration. A good way to keep your agility up is interval training. This is jogging but with 30-60 second bursts of sprinting, the sprinting is good for your agility and the jogging in between keeps your heart rate up and so is good cardio as well.
3. Muscle memory: Basically throwing and catching. The muscles in your body will be able to recreate the actions for throwing and catching at the start of next year, if you keep practicing your throws. This can be in the back garden with your family or down the park with your mates or at your local teams training which I strongly suggest you attend if you can as it will be the best practice for ultimate.

I understand that most people will be working over the summer and as such will not have much free time for all this fitness (myself included). But I would strongly suggest attempting to do as much as possible for people wanting to make first team next year. First team trainings will be running from the first Friday back and for the first two weeks they will be open to anyone wanting to make first team next year, and after that I will be selecting from all that have shown interest for the next few weeks and will be basing my first team for indoor regionals from those that show most promise and commitment in these first team trainings as well as at Wednesday trainings.