Special Education Needs and Fitness

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” Navy SEALs

Do you want results or do you want to keep results?  Think about the difference and keep reading…

I’m going to show you how to achieve ground breaking results in any field faster than ever before by slowing down. You’ll learn how to use a method developed to educate children and young adults with Special Educational Needs, and apply it to your fitness goals. In fact you can use this in any field…  

The Four Part Cycle

If you’re a Teacher, you’ll be familiar with the Four Part Cycle. If you’re not, then let me summarise it for you.  It’s a proven method used in mainstream and SEN schools to help children and young adults with Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD), Dyslexia, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder achieve the best outcomes. In fitness, we rush into goals like they’re owed to us and it’s a misconception that the quicker you start and the more extreme you go with detoxes, liquid diets and other self-punishing rituals, the quicker you’ll lose weight.  

One thing is right though, you do need to start as quick as possible…but it’s the planning and structure you need to spend time on first…let’s take a look:

Assess

Using the information gathered during the whole assessment  process to identify progress, you find out barriers to learning, challenges and if students may need additional formal tests like Cognitive Abilities Tests, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, abstract reasoning and spatial ability to help identify specific conditions. This could involve looking over recent reports, plans and performance as well as talking to people involved in the journey so far.  Imagine how long that could take!  

Plan

The first step is always to set targets (usually a mix of curricular and extra curricular) by discussing, planning and agreeing with people who know the student well. These include but are not limited to TA’s, Teachers, SENCO and parents. Any additional provisions, for example sports and physical goals, should have clear and expected outcomes and utilise only specialists in that field.  You see while you’re Googling the latest juice diet pushed by non-qualified people, in education multi-disciplinary teams who are specialists in their field work with students on the things they are qualified to do so.  You won’t have Teaching staff trying to diagnose specific conditions and then taking action towards those, it could have a catastrophic affect.

Do

After all that, now it’s time to actually deliver HQT (High Quality Teaching) with the targets and outcomes always in mind. Constant evaluation of performance, challenges and successes ensure students stay on track to achieve.  Feedback from the pupil, SENCO, TA’s, Parents and Teachers and any other professionals involved also helps steer everyone in the right direction during lessons and activities. This phase is about doing the activities and actions that lead towards targets and goals set out previously. If you were to take the goals away, all you’d be doing are just actions without and end goal in mind! Why would you do that?

Review

The actions are done and it’s time to review how everyone did. This could be after a few lessons or may be a whole term or longer depending on what was set out. The two most important things here are that the review always be led by an appropriate professional and that the child’s view on their own experience is heard. Just because an appropriate professional is leading the review, doesn’t mean others cannot contribute. Teaching Assistants’ accurate records of progress or any outstanding work corroborating success can contribute to the review. These contributions give a well-rounded picture to the parents and child about how many professionals are invested in their success, serving as a good reminder of how far they have come to keep them motivated moving into the next stage in a positive frame of mind.

So how could you use this to help get results fast FOR YOU? 

Let’s say you have a goal to lose body fat so you can feel more confident and better about yourself. This is how you would use the Four Part Cycle:

Assess

• Quantify your progress so far. Have you been on a plan recently? How much weight did you lose? How much was fat? If you’ve not been training then what’s stopped you? 
• Assess yourself out of 10 and strive to be above that in every action you take moving forward from here on in

Plan

• Set your goal which should be long term, ie lose 4% body fat in 12 weeks
• Set your targets which are medium term achievements ie 2% loss in 4 weeks, 3% loss in 8 weeks and 4% in 12 weeks
• Set your actions which are short term, daily things you do without fail that drive you towards your targets and goal
• Have a contingency for failures because there will be a lot of these. Be ready and have a couple of steps you always follow whenever something goes wrong. Being prepared will keep you on track.
• Now discuss this whole journey with the most important people to you, any professionals involved and keep to everyone’s expertise area. Treat this with the same dedication you would towards training, ensuring to put time aside specifically for this.  Don’t rush it and don’t disrespect this just because it’s not a training session or a diet related activity. Essentially it’s the fundamental core your plan sits on and could be the make or break of your journey! 
• Keep people within their expertise areas, let your Trainer train you, let your parents be involved in their way, let your friends hear your stories. Do not cross them over and expect your friends to be your Trainers or your Trainer to be your Nutritionist.  Make the decision on who does what and if you are really lacking dietary knowledge, get a Nutritionist or get the knowledge yourself.

Do

• Each session should have an outline, objectives and clarity on WHY you are doing each movement. This will have been planned in the previous stages and could be a detailed journal of the session. During the actual training time you’ll just be briefed on objectives in a few seconds ie “tonight we aim for 3 circuits of x y z.” 
• Get in the gym or wherever you’re training and get it done! Have fun, push yourself and see progression. Ideally each session will compliment the next and it all links together. 
• Never train randomly and definitely don’t get a Trainer who makes you do this!
• Monitor your progress during your ongoing evaluations, noting successes, challenges, failures and make adjustments where necessary.
• Do not try to plan your sessions while you’re training or just as you walk into your session. I’m sure even the most experienced Trainers and Recreational Athletes can easily make up a session on the spot. But there’s too many parameters and variables to account for successfully over a long term plan and you’ll miss the vital ones by getting lazy in your planning.

Review

• Ensure your Trainer leads this at regular intervals or at the end of your phase. You’ve put your hard work and dedication into achieving your goal, this is your moment to bask in your glory! This should have your achievements, your progress, your challenges, how you overcame them, if you didn’t then what you learnt etc.
• Give your feedback on what the journey has been like, your voice is the most important.
• Your friends and family don’t have to be involved in person in this, but some contribution would help. It could just be a chat to get their feedback on their involvement in your journey, how they’ve seen the change in you, etc.
• Pick out the things that you learnt and get ready to implement them in your next goal, don't let valuable lessons and experiences slip through the net!

This is a system used to plan, track and achieve results for children with Special Educational Needs that has the power to get people working in synergy for a collective goal.  Your health and fitness is too valuable to just tackle without due diligence.

Good luck!