Sports and Treadmills

Treadmills seem to be a constant in every gym and health club today. Today, you can often see treadmills being used by athletes in training. The question, however, is this: what exactly is the connection between sports and treadmills?

Well, you have to realize that there is more than one connection between the two. The biggest connection between sports and treadmills, however, is the fact that a treadmill helps build up endurance. Treadmills exercise people by making them run, right? Running actually helps people get more and more used to having to handle a constant amount of physical exercise for longer and longer periods of time.

What is the advantage of building up endurance? In order to answer this, we turn back to the old adage of “slowly but surely wins the race”. A lot of sports today require endurance. Although there are skillful people who may just explode with energy at the start of a competition, it is often the case that they get tired easily and are beaten later in the game. By building up endurance, a person will be able to make sure that he or she will be able to exert a constant amount of effort throughout the game, not lagging too much at the start of the competition and ready to capitalize on the burn out of opponents later on.

Endurance is actually pretty important in almost all sports. Although most people think that long distance runners are the only ones who benefit from endurance training, all types of athletes actually make use of treadmills to increase their endurance. Martial artists such as judoka, taekwondo jins and karateka actually benefit from having excellent endurance as some fights may last a long time until a fighter gets tired.

Building endurance is also very important in sports such as basketball, volleyball, and soccer wherein people have to maintain their level of performance while the clock still ticks. Usually, break periods in these sports are too short to recover your energy properly. By building up your endurance, you can make sure that you go on playing.

Endurance is not the only thing developed by the treadmill. Actually, the treadmill is also often used to develop the psychology of an athlete. In one reality show, athletes were made to run on the treadmill to see how long they can go. It was a measure of their heart or their will to succeed. Not many people realize this, but a lot of athletes fail simply because they do not have the will to succeed.

The treadmill is used to observe exactly what happens to an athlete when he or she reaches the point when he or she does not think that they can run anymore. A determined athlete will keep going despite the pain, knowing that beating the treadmill means actually achieving something. However, there are a few athletes who cower at the first real hardship they face. This attitude must be taken away and replaced with a hunger to succeed. When athletes manage to overcome that hardship which makes them want to stop, they are able to catch their second wind and keep running. This hunger to keep going will help athletes even outside the realm of sports.

Of course, the most noticeable connection between sports and treadmills is the fact that a treadmill helps keep an athlete in excellent physical condition. The treadmill trains athletes using the most basic physical exercise known to man: walking. There are certain periods in time when athletes are not training as rigorously as usual. This may be because of a holiday or because it is the off-season of the sport that the athletes participate in.

During these periods, athletes have a tendency to “grow soft”. This means that the athlete is not as fit as should be. By making use of exercise equipment, athletes are able to maintain their physical fitness and thus, save a lot of effort and time when the next season comes. This means they will actually have more room for improvement.

The deepest connection between sports and treadmills, however, lies in the fact that these two things actually test people. These things test people’s wills and physical prowess and thus, make people strive to make themselves better.