Planning - Action

Today, my group and I had a 30-minute conference call on Skype to discuss our plans for our Group 4 project. The main question we were tried to answer was whether we want to focus on the theoretical or practical side of our topic (stretching). There are loads of experiments we could do as a group to test whether stretching improves physical performance that we could do, but we weren't sure if it is worth doing it when there is a lot of theoretical information on the topic.

If we do decide to base our project on experiments that we do, our main challenge will be figuring out a way to measure the impact of strength in the following areas of fitness: strength, flexibility, endurance, and agility. We brainstormed and came up with certain experiments we could do: sit and reach (flexibility), how high can one jump (strength), beep test (agility and endurance).

We decided to do some more research on our topic and meet in 3 days to make a final decision. We will be looking at how stretching affects 4 different areas of fitness. Each group member will be researching one area (I will be doing strength). We will also be investigating what kind of experiment we could do to test the impact. Some questions we also generated are:

- What does stretching do to your body?
- Why is it supposed to be important to warm up muscles before doing exercise?

By Thursday my group will have a plan on how to carry out the Action part of the Group 4 project.

Planning - Choosing a topic

Hi, my name is Adèle and I am a IB year 2 IB Biology Standard Level student at the International School of Kenya. This blog is devoted to following the progress myself and my group do while working on developing an experiment for this year's Group 4 Project. This year's theme is sport science. The other members of my group are Sarah, Eminet and Moses.

We first began discussing potential project ideas when we were assigned our groups. Sitting all in a circle, we had a quick brainstorming session where we threw ideas potential ideas. To further develop these, I set up a Facebook group with the 4 other members of my group. Here, I started posting links to articles related to sport science, to add more ideas to the mix. After a few days of mulling over possible experiments and activities we could look into, we made a list of all our ideas: 

• Anatomy
• Exercise Physiology
• Energy Systems
• Movement analysis
• Skill in sports
• Measurements and evaluations of human performance
• Nutrition for Sport and Health
• Optimizing Physiological Performance
• Psychology of Sport
• Physical activity and Health

After much discussing on Facebook, we trimmed the list down to our top three choices:• Does playing sports make you brain more effective and efficient 

• Movement analysis: Stretching and to what extent does it help 

• Energy Transfer through Balls



After much more discussing on Facebook, we agreed to choose the second choice: the impact of stretching on physical activity: "To what extent does stretching improve sporting performance?". We will be basing our experiments and hypotheses on the following websites:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/08/why-stretching-may-not-help-before-exercise/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22692125
https://ce.gssiweb.com/Article_Detail.aspx?articleID=736
http://jurchperformanceeducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Does-Stretching-Improve-Performance.pdf

Stretching is an action that many of us remember being stressed do to before, during and after we do sports. However, we found online that there is the possibility that stretching does not improve performance and may not need to be done at all. This is what we would like to prove in our project and research. Following our decision, we had another little brainstorming session on our Facebook group to discuss possible experiments we could do. I suggested that we could experiment by focusing on certain aspects of fitness: flexibility, strength, endurance. We could do certain exercises in each area of fitness, with one control who does stretching, and the variable group not stretching. This will test to see if stretching has a short term impact on physical performance. We will be focusing on Biology for this experiment. 

With this research and planning done, I thoroughly believe my group is ready to continue to the next section of the project: Action.