class 11 health and physical education ncert book chapter 8 · Section 2

Health Related Physical Fitness Activity . Compare the strength of your classmates with an Arm Wrestling competitor. A new born baby cannot stand up and walk because they has less strength. So, we can say that for every movement of body part or for moving body from one position to another position, strength is required. Whenever we think about sports performance, the first thing which comes into our mind is the muscular strength. Normally we use the term strength instead of muscular strength. If we ask someone a question, do you have the strength to do this physical work? He or she will knowingly or unknowingly flex his or her muscle and say I have the strength to do this. This shows in itself that somewhere strength is associated with muscles. Strength is normally understood as the ability of the muscle or group of muscles of an individual to exert force against the resistance. If we are talking about exerting force then the question which comes in our mind is, why do we want to exert force? For this we have to look into the nature of the sports activities. We try to act against the resistance. Now the resistance can be of two types. It can be internal resistance like your own body weight or it can be external resistance like opponent’s body weight. In some of the cases we act against the resistance which we cannot conquer and in some of the cases we act to overcome that resistance. In both the cases we exert force with the help of our muscles. Muscular strength is thus, ‘the ability of the muscle or muscle groups of an individual to exert force on the resistance to overcome it or to act against it as per the demand of the sports activity’. Moving further, we look at how the muscular strength ability is used according to the nature of sports. We find that sometimes we need to apply force against the maximum resistance, but it is for shorter duration and sometimes we need to apply the force for longer duration. Taking into account the nature of sports as far as strength abilities are concerned, we can divide the strength abilities into three parts— (a) Maximum Strength: The name itself reflects that we are talking about something to its maximum limit. So, we can say that when our muscle or muscles group is able to generate the force with per cent effort by which we are able to tackle the maximum resistance in a single contraction, it is called maximum strength of an individual. It is the ability which is of great use in the sports like weight lifting, throw events in athletics, etc. Do You Know? •• Aerobic capacity is the capacity to work in the presence of maximum amount of O2 and the nature of the work is of longer duration. •• Anaerobic capacity is capacity to work in less amount of O2 and nature of work is of short duration. -