Horror as Sport Imperial tries to bulk girls up

Two weeks before term starts, sport imperial organized some FREE pre-season fitness for all abilities from those elite athletes among us, as well as anyone just wanting to look in tiptop shape for the incoming freshers!

The first week was fitness-focused to get the beer bellies and summer laziness out of our systems. Day 1 set the tone by starting with the very innocently named ‘4x4s’. This in fact turned out to be 4 minutes of pain followed by 4 minutes of laughing at your partner in pain repeated 4 times… not as fun as it sounds! It was all worth it in the end, however, and the feeling did eventually return to our legs. At least none of our group were sick during this ordeal, unlike some (cough American Football cough). After the pain had worn off, and after a long lunch break it became apparent that a lot of thought had gone into designing sessions specific for each sport and this wasn’t just intended to be a painful reminder of how little exercise we had done over the last few months.

After lunch we paid our first visit to the new Ethos Performance Gym, which will be available for use by certain clubs this year. Now I have to say that as a rather small girl I have never been brave enough to use the weights section in the main Ethos gym, so this was a completely new experience. We were taken slowly through the various lifting techniques by the strength and conditioning coaches (Chris, the coach for the hockey and football group, was a particularly good teacher and had only 3% body fat (!) which gave us all something to aspire to!), and then given a tough strength circuit incorporating the newly learned lifts to finish.

This was the general format of the first week, with morning and afternoon sessions every day targeted at improving our general and sport-specific fitness. Our only relief came during the Thursday afternoon recovery session in the Ethos pool, sauna and ‘ice bath’ (or more accurately, paddling pool with cold water).

In week 2 we put all our weight training and fitness into action with sessions targeting sport-specific techniques such as top speed and speed endurance training. Our group added a fun twist to the week with a ‘Dick-of-the-Day’ shirt kindly provided by our trainer Chris. The winners are featured in the pictures for everyone’s entertainment.

In the gym we learnt Olympic lifts (that is the lifts you see in the Olympics), apparently in the Olympics a 50kg girl could lift twice her bodyweight; I was left feeling a little inadequate by only managing 20kg! However, as with all of the session, this training was designed to improve a specific aspect of our sport-specific strength, in this case by developing our explosive power to help us be quicker off the mark and faster at changing direction.

Agility and power training was then applied to a ‘game situation’ as voted by us (we played dodgeball), and we are assured that there are plans to include this more often in the schedule for next year. In addition to training, free physio and sport massages were available throughout the two weeks was provide to aid our aching muscles and the many small injuries we all acquired during the 2 weeks. All in all it was an extremely beneficial 2 weeks, and all who attended felt fitter and stronger by the end. There are hundreds of photos on the Sport Imperial facebook page so have a look at them to get an idea of the fun we had, and I hope next year more people will come and take advantage of the great opportunity Sport Imperial laid on for us.