Something we're going to talk about in a bit more depth for the activity and physical fitness videos is the appropriate equipment. Now these socks there's eight pairs here. I purchased them on Amazon with my own money. I am not sponsored by Amazon or Saucony. I just happen to prefer Saucony clothing, underarm clothing and I also wear ASICS shoes. None of them I'm sponsored by. You want to have the appropriate equipment when you're starting to exercise and we'll go into the benefits of why you need the appropriate equipment in another video very shortly.


Hello and welcome. We're going for another walk. We're actually down at the same lake, the same general spot. This time we're going to be walking the other side of the promontory that we have here. It may not be quite as interesting as the one that we walked on yesterday but it's still exercise and that's a key to exercise and activity. You don't just do it once, you repeat it many times and all of the small improvements that you see on each individual outing they accumulate and the accumulation is what we're after. So I'll spin you around and we can walk the other way and I can give you a little bit more information.



 If you're interested it is a lot colder than it was yesterday and there is just a little bit of a window but not so much that I won't be able to give you some information. You may hear some more birds on and this is a Saturday so we shouldn't be seeing or hearing any construction. So there's really two forms of exercise or activity that you can do to enhance your physical fitness. There's cardio which is what we're doing now. We're walking, it could be jogging, we could be running, we could be cycling.


Anything where we're basically using our own body weight and we're traveling a certain distance  to produce the fitness and the activity effect.

The other major type of physical activity that we could be doing is resistance training. Resistance means working against some external... I always think of it like this.


When I go to the gym, resistance training is dumbbells, barbells, any of the machines that you sit at or stand at that you are pushing or pulling or lifting some sort of weight. You could also be working with resistance bands, sort of giant elastic bands that allow you to require you to stretch them to exercise your muscles. There are also isometric exercises which require some skill in learning and executing because you're using your own body weight and you're not working against some sort of external force like a dumbbell or a barbell.


One of the things that you have to be careful with with the exercise routines is to have a good understanding of what it is that you're doing, how you're going to do it, and what the benefits are and what it is that you need to be wary of to prevent any unforeseen injuries.


With running, jogging, cycling, all of the cardio exercises that we just introduced, having someone to advise you on your form, your posture when you're running, when you're jogging, when you're cycling, or even when you're walking. I mean we take it for granted that humans know how to walk because we've been doing it since we were a small child. But you do need to have someone at least once help you and guide you in doing all of these activities correctly, especially when it comes to resistance training. The joke at the gym that I used to go to was that the biggest danger from resistance training was dropping a plate on your foot or dropping a barbell on your foot and having to go to hospital and have your foot put in a cast. There are other dangers too, incorrectly lifting the exercise. Think of a bicep curl. If you have your arm down beside your body with your palm facing outwards, now use your bicep to lift your elbow up so that you can touch your upper arm. If you can touch your upper arm that's okay, just lift it up as far as you can. The point is that you're working your bicep to lift your arm from straight by your side up to as far as it will go. Having somebody who knows about exercise physiology to study your range of motion, how you move your forearm, how you move your wrist, how you actually complete the exercise and point out any problems or adjustments that need to be made, that's important because you don't want to work against the joints or the muscles in your body while you're exercising. You want to do it consistently and do it in good form.



A long time ago I did actually complete some physical trainer courses at a local university and also the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiologists. One of the biggest issues that we had was ensuring that clients or people that we were training completed the exercise in good form on a consistent basis and understood what they were doing, not just that they had to do something in a certain way. Educating yourself about your body and the exercise you're performing is an important part of your exercise and your improved physical fitness.

When we're talking about physical activity, the good thing would be to have a variety in your exercise. So yesterday we came down here for a walk and today we're down here for another walk. Tomorrow I'm going to be at the gym and I'll walk on a treadmill and I will also do some resistance training. The reason why I am going to be doing resistance training tomorrow is well first of all resistance training is completely different to the cardio training, the walking that we've been doing for the past couple of days and walking on a treadmill at the gym. Having some variety in your exercise is going to help you appreciate the changes in your body but it's also not going to overwork a particular part of your body. So you don't do resistance training every day. You do it every other day or if you are doing resistance training every day, you work a different part of your body. So you might do upper arms like your biceps and your triceps. Yes, you do actually have to start to understand the names of the different parts of your body that you're working. And then you may do your chest and you may work your back and you may work your legs the next day. Your thighs, your quads or your hamstrings which are the back of your legs or your calves so that no one part of your body gets overworked and gets overtaxed because that's when you do have the issue of injuries cropping up. And I know that when I related that I strained my calf muscle while training for a 10k run, how I treated it and how quickly I got back into running on a treadmill, that was definitely not good.

In a nutshell, I rushed it. I went at it too fast. I did not allow myself to heal properly and I had several small reinjures during my recovery period. I should have been doing something else, not running again on the treadmill so quickly. So just in case anybody is interested, we are sitting on a bench by Lake Ontario in Ontario, Canada. And Lake Ontario is one of the Great Lakes in North America and I will have some statistics in a message at the end of this post.

And I'll also have a couple of pictures that I've taken while I was down here. And that brings me to another subject relating to physical activity. The physical activity doesn't have to be necessarily for its own sake. I come down here for photography of boats and lakeside scenes at different times during the day, during different seasons. It just happens to be March 2024 right now. And when I come down here, I am exercising. I'm walking and I'm carrying camera gear.

Okay, so now we're going to head back to the car. We're going to Starbucks for a coffee and then we're going to go home. But just remember that exercise, physical activity, can be incorporated in so many other hobbies and things that you enjoy doing. And photography certainly is one of the things that brings me down here and walking. So bye for now and talk to you soon.