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Physical activity for health, fitness, and performance
By Dr. Howie Wenger and Michelle Cormier, Navy Physical Fitness Manager
Physical activity plays a key role in being healthy, fit, and able to perform your best in operational settings. We can achieve many health benefits from doing physical activities that range from light (such as walking) to quite intense efforts such as longer distance running, weight training, or sprints. Some of these benefits include: reducing the risk of heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and colon cancer while enhancing our self-esteem, reducing anxiety, relieving depression, managing stress, and maintaining an optimal body weight.
However, if we want to improve our physical and functional fitness, it is necessary to step up the intensity and/or duration of the physical activity to enhance our anatomy and physiology. It also becomes necessary to focus the activities toward those changes that we desire. For example, to increase leg, core and arm strength so that we are able to lift, carry, pull, or drag loads, we need to load the specific muscle in the specific movements to make them stronger. This requires a more structured exercise prescription that features variations in loading (amount of weight or resistance), regular repetition and rest.
Furthermore, if we want to improve our ability to do very specific and physically demanding operational tasks such as carry loads up and down ladders, transporting loads in confined spaces, and hauling in loads with ropes etc., we need to focus on physical activities that simulate these tasks in movements, repetitions, load, and rest. The focus in this case is on both fitness and skill.
The one to two year cycle in the navy that changes from deployment to regeneration to individual and group training to pre-deployment and to deployment again, offers both an opportunity and a challenge to develop all three of the above types of physical activity-related benefits.
Athletes often follow a similar cycle over 1-4 years in which they move from competition to regeneration to general preparation to specific preparation to pre-competition. The cycle that they follow is a fundamental part of a training principle called periodization. This periodized training features a different focus in each of the “periods” throughout the cycle and has planned variation in both the type of and the way that the physical activities are prescribed. There is an emphasis on the basic fitness components such as strength, power, endurance, flexibility, agility, balance, and coordination during the general preparation phase which shifts to the expression of those same components into sport specific (functional) activities in the specific preparation phase and finally, a skill and intensity focus in the pre-competition period.
Periodization is on the way to becoming an important part of the physical activity prescriptions for the Navy as we seek to meet the CDS mandated goal of a “healthy and operationally fit force”. Many of the principles inherent in “periodization” are being used to guide the exercise prescriptions throughout our force generation cycle to insure we acquire health benefits, achieve high levels of functional fitness and attain optimal operational fitness. This emphasis is illustrated in the model below.
Stay tuned for more detail as we continue the quest to provide forces personnel with the most effective and efficient exercise prescriptions for achieving your personal goals and the goals of the CF.
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