The new decade at Spring Brook has brought a very competitive edge to our pupils and staff as we perform fitness challenges during our PE lessons.

Each week we focus on a different component of fitness and every pupil and member of staff completes various challenges to the best of their ability. Our focus is on learning how the different types of fitness affect our bodies and which sports we could be best at depending on our results from the challenges. Also everyone competes against not only each other but also their own scores from previous years.

So far this half term we have completed the following challenges:

The Strength Challenge week which involved finding out our maximum weight lifts for 1 repetition for 5 different parts of the body:

• Deadlift
• Bench Press
• Squat
• Grip Strength
• Seated Basketball Throw

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We always weigh each person beforehand and then the pupils can work out their percentage body weight lifted for each exercise so that it is fair and that everyone can compete against each other.

The Cardiovascular week which involved measuring how powerful our lungs are with a peak flow measure and then completing the bleep test which became VERY competitive with pupils performing multiple bleep tests to try to improve their scores!!!

The Speed, Agility and Power week which involved measuring how fast we can accelerate, how fast we can change direction and how far we can jump with the following challenges:

• 13m Sprint
• Illinois Agility Test
• Standing Long Jump
• Standing Vertical Jump
• 3 Cone Test

The pupils have really done well in the fitness challenges so far with some new school records being set this year which is incredible! We still have some challenges yet to go (the calorie challenge, muscular endurance and Spring Brook’s strongest pupil) which I will blog about over the next half term.

Aside from the ‘standard’ PE lessons we have also been over to Manchester City to compete in their football league and have just attended a Change for Life Tae Kwon-do event run by Oldham School Sport which was great fun..

After a well deserved week off at half term we’ll be ready to go again as the weather hopefully gets warmer.

Mr Hopkins

You can catch up with last term’s PE update here