Literacy Profile

One of my non-school social world literacies is fitness. Having always been involved in sports such as soccer, track, tennis, basketball, cross country, baseball, and many more, I learned that there are appropriate ways to practice fitness and exercise and these are things that I am constantly thinking about and practicing during the day. There are many elements that go into the concept of fitness, some of them are nutrition/diet, cardiovascular exercise, and weight lifting.

I had become interested in the whole entire concept of fitness from an early age when I realized that the things I put into myself or did to myself could affect my performance in the future, but I didn’t really practice a fitness focused lifestyle. I mainly just started studying the different things that athletes would say they did for themselves to be able to achieve some of the things I witnessed. But one major thing that I did discover was how important diet and nutrition was as a building block to everything else in fitness.

While I understood all of the elements that went into a good diet and nutrition, I can’t say I had really practiced a healthy diet until 2010 when I took a nutrition class at URI which really opened my eyes to the practice of a healthy diet. This class made me examine my own diet over a month and a half and analyze the elements associated with a nutritional diet. This activity made me see where my diet was lacking and where it was overloaded, and I started to change my eating habits. Not only did I start eating better to get all the vitamins I needed, but to also boost mental and physical capacities.

On top of diet are many other elements, some have already been listed previously. One of them is cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is exercise to strengthen the heart. This type of activity will allow the heart to keep a slower and more regulated pace when not participating in physical activity. An example of cardio vascular exercise, and my favorite is running. My track coach in high school who is also one of my neighbors taught me a lot about running and the conditioning of the body in order to be able to run long distances. Through practice and reading articles about running I had learned about pacing yourself during a long race so you do not tire your body out and can get all the functions of your bodies regulated to work together, including your heart, keeping a constant pace. One person who stood out in making me want to learn a lot about running was the late, great runner Steve Prefontaine.

A third element of fitness and the last one that I have become involved in is weight lifting. My brother has always been into building muscle and becoming very fit. About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to start building muscle and I began doing a lot of research on certain supplements to build muscle. My friend is a personal trainer and began giving me some tips and even showed me some things in his gym at no charge. In the past year, I have contributed to many weight lifting blogs and have even taught some lifting techniques to my other friends.

Combining these different elements of fitness I have grown to see that my thinking is often a lot clearer and I am able to do a lot of different things that I wasn’t able to do before. Doing this type of stuff, I have also learned the values of persistence and focus. Something I can take both into work and into my education. I see that what you put into something will yield desirable results.

These ideals are something that I can bring to my classes and show my students that hard work pays off and that everything is connected and scaffolding is necessary to develop different knowledge development. I can also bring up professional athletes and speak about the different routines they have in order to better themselves and compare it to the students’ own learning.