Advice on what to do to keep fit

SPORT and exercise are a huge part of our daily lives and often one area that we build our routine around so it feels very strange to not have it right now.

Most GAA teams across the country have been training hard for the last few months. Although all GAA activity as well as all other sporting activities are on hold for now, it is important to find new ways to look after our physical and mental health and sport can still play a huge role in that.

Regardless of your sport of choice, fitness and skill levels can be maintained without group training with the help of some creativity.

Sligo GAA Games Development & Coaching staff are working to help with this.

Each member of staff has been assigned an age group for all the clubs in the county.

Everyday skills work and a skills challenge is sent out to players for them to practice on their own.

This gives players an opportunity to get a lot of touches of the football or sliotar to practice their skills and also to challenge themselves.

An exercise and exercise challenge of the day are also being sent to each group to maintain levels of physical activity.

In terms of fitness work that players have been doing in the gym, these sessions can be modified to do at home.

We can use things at home to replace weights and also add tempo (how long it takes to complete each repetition) into our exercises to challenge us in a different way.

In Sligo GAA we categorise our exercises into a number of movement patterns.

This allows us to organise exercises and helps with programming.

We can also assign levels of difficulty to our exercises and can give progressions and regressions to a player where necessary.

Within the image we have 6 different movement patterns with three levels of difficulty for each one.

These 6 movement patterns can be used as a gym programme that can be done at home.

By beginning at Level One for each exercise you can determine the level of difficulty for you and progress to the next level when appropriate.

As always with gym work, technique is key and progression should only occur when we are technically proficient.

By using tempo (e.g. taking 4 seconds to perform one repetition) to slow down each repetition we can focus on technique as doing movements at speed makes it harder to see the breakdown in technique.

It also increases the difficulty of the exercise and therefore keeps it challenging.

We have demonstrations of these exercises as well as skills challenges on our YouTube Channel –Sligo GAA Coaching & Games Development.