Now you can learn to train for Gold at your local gym…
Fitness First has created the Team GB Pro Athlete Programme to give members a taste of what training like a Team GB athlete could feel like. The programme focuses on five key fitness disciplines which any professional athlete requires, speed, endurance, power, agility and strength. The class particularly focuses on three key phases; training, which centres around the five key disciplines; competition, competing against one another whilst incorporating the five key disciplines and finally, teamwork, learning the importance of working together to achieve the best possible results. A functional core workout follows each phase in order to strengthen the core, an attribute inherent crucial to successful athletic performance. It’s vital to remain focussed in order to achieve your fitness goals. Olympic bronze medallist and European gymnastics champion Max Whitlock says,“I never get a day when I wake up thinking ‘I don’t want to go to the gym.’ I always want to get in the gym and train hard and I’m really motivated to be the best I can. If I was to give any advice it would be the same advice my parents would give me, probably some of the best advice I’ve had, and that is to set yourself goals. And that goes for sport and any type of career. If you don’t set yourself goals it’s hard to work towards anything.”
Double Olympic gold cycling medallist (2008, 2012) and World Record holder, Ed Clancy, tells us about his sport and motivations…
- “I think you find in cycling, people – cyclists – got into it just because they love riding bikes and we’re just like big kids. When you’re approaching the big events and you’ve got the Olympic Golds hanging in front of you and you can really draw motivation and inspiration from that. But day to day, two years out, I think you just go out and train and push yourself just for the love of riding and racing bikes.”
- “I guess it’s a combination of speed and endurance for us professional cyclists. In the team pursuit, it’s very important to get the team up to speed before the weight of aerodynamics takes its toll so we’ve got to be fast, we’ve got to be powerful but really it’s about the endurance to back that up in the last three or four minutes when hopefully the competition is starting to fall apart.”
- “People are generally pretty clued up on how to work hard and how to improve their fitness, but I think the one thing that is perhaps neglected a lot of the time, especially by amateur athletes, is the fact that you only get better if you’re fuelling it right and you’re taking time to recover. So I guess rest and recuperation is just as important as the working hard bit.”
