Muscular Strength

Have you ever done something and felt stronger right afterwards? For me I felt like this in fitness class. I grew in persistence specifically muscular strength over the course of this year. It started simple, just a small workout before every fitness day. Every once in a while our warm ups got longer and harder. Eventually I was able to not only keep up with the harder activities, like burpees, which are exercises where you squat down and put your hands on the floor, do a pushup and jump into the air and then do it again, but I felt like I could surpass them. This leads me to believe that I have grown in muscular endurance.  This wasn’t an easy change, I really did have to work for it. In class we started lifting weights and at first I started with eight pound weights. After a day of those I moved up to a larger weight, which was ten pounds, and then I moved up again on the day after that to a twelve pound weight. At the beginning of those days it was hard to lift the weight, but by the end I could lift it without any trouble at all.  We had weight charts in class that show what weight I used and you can see I moved up.

At the beginning of every class we jog for a certain amount of time. When we started, the time was only a few minutes. It was hard for me because I hadn’t ran a lot prior to this activity. Every class I pushed myself to work harder and be faster than last time. Eventually I could hold a strong pace for the entire time that I was jogging. Every once in a while the time that we were jogging increased by a minute. By this time I had been not only able to keep up with the time, but I could jog much faster. This is growth in muscular endurance because at the start I didn’t have a lot of muscular endurance. As time went on, and I pushed myself more and more, I was able to keep up with the time. This means that my muscles strengthened

The thirty day challenge was another project we did where I felt growth. Before this project we did three fitness tests. The tests were in core exercises, upper body exercises and running. We picked our lowest scoring test, and worked on that muscle group. We did workouts specific to the area we were trying to develop and wrote them down in a book. Then, we graphed equations for how much exercise we did over the course of thirty days. We then did the exercise based on our plans, and got stronger. I was working on core muscle so I had to do crunches and sit-ups, which are ab exercises were you sit on the floor and pull your body up and down with your core muscels. This motion causes the muscles to tear and then they heal stronger. At the beginning of the project my core got tired very quickly, but as I started doing more and more every day, I got stronger and less tired. At the end we did the test over again to see our improvement and I had a whole four minutes off my mile time! This shows that I grew because I achieved a higher score then the first time I did the running test.

When you run your heart pumps faster because you’re using more oxygen and food to provide energy to your body to move at such a rate. Working out can tear your muscles but when they grow back they are bigger. This process, repeated several times, is how you develop more muscles. If you keep doing something for a long time, you get better at it. I got to be a better runner, and have more upper body strength by working the muscle groups that are in those areas, like my legs or my shoulders.

I think that I was persistent throughout this process because sometimes my muscles got really sore from working them a lot but I never gave up even though I always felt tired and sore after exercise. I had to push myself to get up and work because if I didn’t then I would never get stronger. Sometimes it was hard but it was worth it to be where I am now. I grew in persistence specifically muscular strength, by working hard and practicing over and over again.