Week 3: A Relaxed But Engaging Week

Its Friday everyone! It’s the end of the week and everyone is looking forward to the weekend. (I hope!)  But with week ending, there are a lot of things I get to share with you all and I...

Before I talk about what I did this week I wanted to give you guys a glimpse of what my site looks like.  I know this is long overdue, but better late than never!

Basically this is the area where clients work out. What you cannot see in this picture is the other side of the building. On the other side, near the door, there are squat racks.  And near the interior on the other side, there is the front desk and in the very back are the bathrooms and showers.  It’s not a huge center but it’s very functional and overall a fun place to intern!

Now onto what I did this week. This week offsite , for me, was little bit more relaxed compared to the last to weeks. But,I was still able to progress with my action plan. Last week I had begun to condense my four surveys. I started to combine my post workout survey and background survey with my long-term survey.  This weekend I was able to finish condensing those three surveys into one bigger survey with three sections.After compiling those three surveys and finalizing the pre-workout survey, I had sent them to my faculty advisor and to my site mentor. On Monday, I was able to get my surveys the initial approval from my faculty advisor and on Tuesday, I got my site mentor’s approval.  The rest of this week for me was coordinating with my on site mentor and getting the initial surveys out to people. And as people take these surveys, I intend to tweak them based on any confusion or problems people have taking the survey.

This week on site, although somewhat relaxed, was still very eye opening. I still continued to observe clients and get in the occasional workout. But what a memorable event for me this week was being able to talk with my site mentor about fitness in general. We had a few talks that were very interesting to me.  The first talk was based on a question I had— “Can one type exercise reduce stress more than others?” He explained to me that there’s not one exercise that can reduce more stress than others. However, relatively speaking exercises that require more work or require a greater exertion can release more endorphins. The release of more endorphins can potentially reduce more stress.  In a way certain exercises that require more work could potentially reduce someone's stress more.

Another talk we had was on metabolism. It was based on the question I had that if a person eats smaller quantities of food more times in a day, could he or she increase their metabolism? He said that the amount of times you eat in a day matter less compared to what you eat— i.e do you get the right ratio of proteins to carbohydrates to fats. But he did not deny say that metabolism could change over time. He elaborated his view by giving me an example. For instance, if you initially were consuming 2000 calories and then decided for a span of time consume to only 1000 calories.  Then, he believes, that over that span of time, your metabolism could slow down. The question is, if metabolism could slow down, is there a possibility for it to speed up? If so then how? This question still interests me and I intend ask my site mentor more on it next week. 

Well, that was a lot of info in two paragraphs. So, I hope the memes and content still kept your attention! This past week the conversations I had with my site mentor were truly engaging and I hope they were interesting to you as well. I am also very eager to start giving out my initial surveys and am excited to see the results that come in. Again, I hope I did not bore you. Tune in next week to see my progress!