Me + Sports

I’ve always considered myself somewhat of a sporty person. Don’t get me wrong - I’m first and foremost an INTP bookworm. But I also like to move. My dad is very athletic, and has always been involved in one sport or another. My mom, on the other hand, is… not athletic at all. (Even if she does make efforts to do activities with my dad.)

So I guess more because of my dad, I’ve always been involved in sports, despite my bookish ways. It started out with gymnastics, which I loved… then volleyball, golf, and soccer. I even tried my hand at basketball one year! (I’m 5’1”!) I have been skating since I was 2 (or so I’ve been told), but for whatever reason my parents never enrolled me in hockey, and by the time I was interested in playing, I thought I was too far behind the other girls my age, skill-wise. My parents have actually admitted that it’s because I’m a girl that they didn’t really think of signing me up. Maybe if my brother had come first, both of us would have played hockey…

Anyway, I still played in several organized sports for most of my childhood, but by the end of high school, I became involved in fewer and fewer of them. I think I felt like I had too many other things to do. I had started working on evenings and weekends, and I had a boyfriend that I wanted to spend time with, so I stopped playing soccer in the summer, and my extracurricular activities dwindled down to pretty much just biking and hiking/trail running. Once I got to university, I worked so much (on schoolwork AND to make money!) that I didn’t even see how I could find the time to get involved in sports. I had full courseloads, a part-time job (at some points more than one!) and a relationship to juggle. So again, all I did was bike, rollerblade, and do some hiking during the summers. In the winter, we’d go (downhill) skiing maybe once or twice, and I’d sometimes snowshoe with my parents, but that’s it.

Now that I’m pretty much done with school (finally), I’ve gotten back to playing more sports! Since the beginning of my MA, I’ve made time for yoga. This winter, I added cross-country skiing to the winter sports I’ve been doing more and more of. And I just registered this morning for an amateur softball league, which I am very excited about. In fact, that’s what led me to this whole reflection on my relationship to sports. I suppose if I was a die-hard sports fanatic (like MB), I would never have gone all those years without being involved in one type of sport or another. (I probably wouldn’t have gained so much weight during my BA either!) So it has to do with priorities, I guess. I know the fact that I’m involved in more sports now has to do with being with MB, too. But I do enjoy sports, regardless of whether or not I am practicing them with him – and I am so happy to be moving more again now.

4-minute workout

Just read about a new workout method called “Tabata” (in the G&M).

In a half-hour, at home, I could warm up, do eight Tabata intervals, and shower. Sounds like a good New Year’s resolution to me…

Tabata, a type of high-intensity interval training that was originally developed for Japan's Olympic speed-skating team, is fast gaining popularity as a high-speed new-mom workout. The Tabata method is used most widely by elite athletes. But Tabata has recently taken off among women looking to get back into postpartum shape.

Named after Izumi Tabata, a former researcher at Japan's National Institute of Fitness and Sports, the compressed workout has a simple format: Do an exercise (such as push-ups or jumping rope) for 20 seconds at full intensity, and then take a 10-second break. Repeat seven times, varying exercises, for a total workout of four minutes.

Tabata training is effective, despite its brevity, because the body continues to burn calories at a high rate during the recovery period, says Martin Gibala, chair of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton. In a study published last year in the Journal of Physiology, Prof. Gibala and his research team found that participants who did high-intensity interval training for just 1 1/2 hours total each week enjoyed the same physical benefits as those who did 4 1/2 hours of endurance training on a stationary bike. Both groups had similar levels of muscle development and lipid oxidation (which improves endurance and reduces the risk of developing obesity and diabetes). "You can get away with less time and see many of the same adaptations we associate with endurance training," Prof. Gibala says.