Monday Wellness Reflection

I chose the topic of weight lifting for multiple reasons. The first being I am an athlete and I wanted to know more about my body and how I can get it stronger. I also wanted to know how to weight lift correctly. Sports have always been a huge part of my life, especially baseball, and I had always been the small kid in school, so to fix that I got into weightlifting sophomore year and decided I wanted to get bigger and stronger. I chose this topic also because this is a scarce subject with classmates. At saratoga, it’s primarily focused on academics and a lot of kids don’t play sports sadly. I chose this topic so that I could help encourage people why it's good to exercise, especially weight lifting

Another reason why I chose to do this topic was because Chris plays football and is big into weight lifting too. Before we found our topic for our project, we were talking about ideas, and he told me that he loved to play football and work out. I asked why he loved to work out and he told me that it helped get his mind off of things and that he wanted to be strong so he could challenge other people in football  Because of this, we both wanted to find out what exactly happens when we lift and why it happens.

The most interesting thing I learned while doing this project was that too get bigger, take more rest days. I found this very interesting because everyone thinks that to get bigger, one needs to lift more without rest days. However this is wrong because the muscle needs time to grow and if you keep lifting everyday, then it allows only a little time for it to grow because of the more tears you cause. When muscle grow, the fibers are increasing in size

This can be attributed to an increase in contractile proteins, myofibrils per muscle fiber, connective tissue, and or increased enzymes and stored nutrients. There are two types of muscle growth which are chronic hypertrophy, which is long term, and transient hypertrophy, which is short term.

My topic is important for Health and Wellness because exercise has many positive effects on the body. Without exercise, people would be overweight all the time and possibly obese. Weightlifting helps the body improve strength, endurance, and overall fitness. Weightlifting also lowers blood pressure and cholesterol and it prevents many cancers like lung cancer, brain cancer, and even colon cancer. Finally weightlifting develops stronger bones and it helps to manage chronic conditions like diabetes obesity, heart disease and osteoporosis which is when your bones become fragile.

On a scale of one to ten I would give myself a nine because Chris and I worked for about eight hours on this project and we put a lot of time and effort into this. We spent numerous hours on research for how weight lifting helps the body, along with finding right pictures and videos to show the class what to do and what not to do.