Health Benefits toVolleyball
On average, playing volleyball for at least 45 minutes per day helps you significantly gain strength, stamina, and increase your health. In these 45 minutes you will burn about 600 calories. The sport also affects your body fat percentage in a very positive way, over a short period of time you will gain more muscle and have less body fat. Playing volleyball also reduces your risk of getting harmful diseases such ashypertension, heart disease and diabetes. This physical activity strengthens your upper body and lower body at the same time and will strengthen yourcardiovascular and respiratory systems. Because of that, your body will circulate more blood and nutrients throughout your body, which improves your overall health. Another benefit is that it improves hand-eye coordination and helps develop fast reflexes. Just like other physical activities, volleyball enhances the health of your bones and joints as well as improves your mental health
What Are the Emotional Benefits of Volleyball?
by Kathryn Rateliff Barr, Demand Media
Adults playing volleyball reap emotional benefits on and off the court. While fitness professionals have much to say about the physical benefits of team sports like volleyball, do not discount the emotional advantages you can gain from the sport. Emotional advantages exist for players of any age group while training, playing and socializing with fellow team players.
Interpersonal Skills
Volleyball requires that teammates work cooperatively, and at a fast pace. Team members also learn to value and respect their fellow team members. A June 2008 study of adult men who engage in regular team sports found that team members developed better networking skills than men who were less involved in team sports, reports the Centre for Economic Policy Research. The cooperation volleyball requires in the game carries benefits at the office. Study author Michael Lechner noted that regular team players earned more annual income than less their active counterparts. Leadership and cooperation skills as well as practice handling wins and loses appropriately provide valuable abilities that transfer to dealing with others in many other situations.
Personal Image
Exercise and participation in team sports reduces depression, according to a study published in the December 2011 edition of the "Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences." Participants in the study reported higher feelings of wellbeing. Your involvement in volleyball can improve your mood, reduce stress and encourage pride in your accomplishments as a team member. The activity can also improve your self-confidence, self-esteem, your body image and make you feel happier about life in general.
Drive to Succeed
Involvement in volleyball can improve your motivation and ability to succeed. As a team player, your cooperative efforts lead to the success or failure of the team. When your team wins, you share in that win. You learn persistence to gain skills in setting, bumping, serving and spikes. In addition, the team environment requires that you practice team-building skills, skills that you use extensively off the court. Volleyball also helps you develop patience with yourself and others as you learn to work well as a team and master specific skills and drills. Team members encourage one another during practice and in the game to give everyone the confidence to keep on trying to master and perfect the necessary skills to win.
Emotional Connections
Volleyball team members often make strong connections that extend beyond the volleyball court and locker room. Your team members become your friends and offer support in other areas of your life. Your interaction with team members provides an emotional network of support, often of particular value to those who may have transferred to a new area or are just starting out. The connection you feel encourages you to remain active in the sport, which also helps keep you fit and feeling positive. In addition, your team provides a social network as well, providing a core activity that you share and have in common.
Five Fitness Components for Volleyball
Speed Volleyball serves and smashes result in very fast ball speed, so players also need to be quick to get to the right position to return or pass the ball. Speed, both in terms of movement and reaction time, can be developed by performing sports-specific exercises such as multidirectional sprinting and using a uneven ball called a reaction ball which bounces unpredictably.
Agility is the ability to move your body quickly and efficiently into a position of your choosing. In volleyball this means getting into the right place at the right time to play a shot. Players often have to dodge, duck and dive to make successful plays and the better their agility, the better they will be able to do this. Training for agility involves performing activities that mimic the demands of the sport including jumping drills, playing shots from awkward positions and multidirectional running, jumping and sprinting.
Power is your ability to generate strength at high speeds and is very important in volleyball. A volleyball net is 10 feet high, so players need leg power to be able to jump high enough to block and smash the ball during play. Hitting the ball with plenty of heat requires upper body power. Power is commonly developed by performing variations of the Olympic lifts, plyometrics or jumping exercises and by training with medicine balls.
Flexibility Squatting or lunging down low to return a volleyball requires limber limbs -- properly called flexibility. Tight muscles do not stretch readily and, if stretched too quickly or too far, may become injured. Flexible muscles are more elastic and capable of greater ranges of movement. Flexibility is developed by stretching, particularly developmental stretches held for 30 seconds or longer. You can also increase your flexibility with proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation or PNF stretching, which involves contracting a muscle hard before stretching it to increase flexibility more rapidly.
Endurance Volleyball matches are usually played to the best of 21 points, and that can take some time if the teams are closely matched. To play continuously for an extended period of time requires good muscular, aerobic and mental endurance. Endurance is best developed by performing sub-maximal or lower-intensity activities for long periods of time. Examples include bodyweight squats, pushups, situps, jogging, cycling and extended volleyball practice periods.