1 . Reasons why you should learn how to surf

The feeling of riding the waves is one you can never describe until you have experienced it. While surfing, you’ll be in a peaceful state as you wait for the next big wave. It can be difficult to explain why, but the whole experience is indeed calm and exciting at the same time.    1    , as if you’re running away from all your worries in life.

Surfing is a physically challenging sport that requires you to use your entire body, making it almost an extreme fitness activity. Every surfing session will certainly make you exercise your whole body. So, expect to have aching muscles after your first surfing session.     2    

There is no denying the fact that healthy and fit people are confident with their bodies.    3    Nevertheless, surfing promotes confidence that isn’t necessarily rooted in how you look or boost your ego (自我). It takes time to learn and even master.

Learning a new skill with a group leads to a sense of accomplishment, and learning how to surf is no different. Although it’s natural to go surfing alone at times, no surfer has surfed without acquaintances (熟人), friends, or club mates. It’s a given for people who surf to share experiences with others, both locally and globally.

Like some other sports, surfing allows you to have time with nature.    5    With surfing, you’re able to observe nature from a different viewpoint. This is an ideal time to be one with nature, so grab the chance to broaden your horizons (视野) as a part of this beautiful planet we live on.

3 . I’ve learned a lot in my many years in the gym, and beginner-me would be shocked by the things present-me does during the workouts.     1    . And I’ve broken pretty much every other rule besides.

Rest days are a convenient tool for making sure you’re not overworking yourself, but that’s all. Organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine recommend leaving 48 hours between intense strength-training periods for a given muscle.     2    , it’s meant to be a general recommendation for beginners and for people who are exercising just to stay healthy. Once you’re talking about athletes or enthusiasts, they acknowledge that training most days of the week is fine, if your program manages tiredness effectively.

The “10% rule” is a not-terrible guideline for figuring out how quickly to improve your training.     3    . As running coach Jason Fitzgerald told us, “While the saying is to only increase weekly mileage (英里数) by 10%, this may be either too conservative or even too aggressive depending on where you start from.” If you’re a beginner and your mileage is overall very low; if we took the rule seriously, you wouldn’t be able to increase from zero to any other number.

    4    , but none of them are necessary. Creatine (肌酸) is one of the best-known muscle-building supplements (补充剂). It’s understood to be effective, but here’s the thing: That it does something for most people doesn’t mean it does very much. Likewise, protein powder is a helpful way to get more protein in your diet, but you don’t need to use a supplement.     5    .

4 . Three years ago, Jasminka Jost was looking for a place for her young son, Vigo, to be active. She had tried playing soccer, but Vigo, who has autism (孤独症), had trouble focusing on the game. Jost needed a safe space for Vigo with coaches who specialized in meeting his needs. That’s when friends referred Jost and her family to the River City Inclusive Cym (RCIG), which offers workout classes for children, teens and adults with disabilities.

The gym has been in operation since 2016, renting space in a traditional gymnastics gym before moving to its current location on Patterson Avenue in April 2022. There’re six hour — long classes per day from Monday through Saturday, each with a maximum of seven attendees and each featuring one coach per participant.

“Our classes consist of an obstacle course,” says Mike McGrath, the founder of RCIG. “There’re four different sections of the gym, and we spend 15 minutes in each section. There’re monkey bars, swings, ropes for climbing and swinging, slides ropes for climbing and swinging, slides, and more. That can sound frightening, but we start from where they’re comfortable. If they just need to touch the rope at first, that’s OK, but our goal is to gradually build their skill level and participation.”

Vigo, now 6 years old, looks forward to classes every week. There’re classes for older kids and young adults, too. Christine Schwab has been bringing her niece. 20-year-old Brennan, for two years and says that the classes have improved her social and motor skills. “The coaches at RCIG were great at getting her to take the extra step — and to believe that she could,” Schwab says. “As a loved one, it’s amazing to see.”

Jost adds the gym is a good place to meet other people facing similar challenges. “Even beyond the classes, there’s a deep sense of community and belonging.” she says. “Vigo has made a lot of little friends, and it’s an opportunity to meet other parents. It’s a place we can all go and just be ourselves.”

6 . As with every World Cup, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar the players will be using a new ball. The last thing competitors want is for the most important piece of equipment to behave in unexpected ways in the most important tournament of the world’s most popular sport, so a lot of work goes into making sure that every new World Cup ball feels familiar to players.

Between shots on goal, free kicks and long passes, many important moments of a soccer game happen when the ball is in the air. So one of the most important characteristics of a soccer ball is how it travels through air.

As a ball moves through air, a thin layer of mostly still air called the boundary layer (边界层)surrounds some part of the ball. At low speeds this boundary layer will only cover the front half of the ball before flowing air peels (划过) away from the surface. In this case, the wake of air behind the ball is somewhat regular and is called laminar flow. When a ball is moving quickly, though, the boundary layer wraps much farther around the ball. When the flow air does eventually separate from the ball’s surface, it does so in a series of chaotic swirls (不规则气旋). This process is called turbulent flow.

When calculating how much force moving air imparts on a moving object — called drag — physicists use a term called the drag coefficient (系数). For a given speed, the higher the drag coefficient is, the more drag an object feels.

It turns out that a soccer ball’s drag coefficient is approximately 2.5 times larger for laminar flow than for turbulent flow. Though it may seem counterintuitive, roughening a ball’s surface delays the separation of the boundary layer and keeps a ball in turbulent flow longer. This fact of physics that — rougher balls feel less drag — is the reason why dimpled (坑坑洼洼的) golf balls fly much farther than they would if the balls were smooth.

8 . Compassion has not been a traditional characteristic of sport. With its UK roots in 19th-century British public schools and universities, modern sport developed as way of creating strong military leaders, training them to develop adaptability defined in those times by iron will and biting the bullet. Fear and harsh criticism were crucial to toughening up players and soldiers alike. The “tough guy” narrative was strengthened by 20th-century media stereotypes and Hollywood’s heroes and became rooted into sport and society.

I’ve heard countless stories like the popular culture I found when I joined the Olympic rowing team in the mid-1990s. We were expected to suffer after mistakes or losses to show that we truly cared, and everyone believed coaches needed to be severe and unforgiving to get results. These approaches still exist. But an alternative approach with compassion at its center addresses aims of performance and wellbeing for those with greater ambitions.

This isn’t some soft option which plays down hard work, as supporters of the earlier traditional sporting mindset might criticize. Research across branches of psychology — behavioral, sports, positive — shows how compassion creates the strongest foundation for adaptability and sustained performance under pressure whether in sport, the military, healthcare or business. Rather than activating our threat system which began to help us survive way back, compassion helps us to feel safe and protected, leaving us free to learn, connect with others and start exploring what we’re capable of.

The continuous need to improve performance has led top coaches to appreciate that high performance requires levels of support to match the level of challenge. When you provide that, players start thriving while striving to achieve more. Rooted in compassion, a different coach-athlete relationship thus develops.

The dictionary definition of compassion includes the recognition of another’s suffering and the desire and support to relieve it. Compassion has been shown to decrease fear of failure and increase the likelihood of trying again when failure does happen. But how many talented athletes experience that depth of support in moments of crisis and failure?

9 . As athletes get stronger and faster, the pace of play continues to increase. The burden of making sure games are played according to the rules and that the officiating (裁判) is accurate is now being taken out of human hands and falling more and more into the lap of technology. It’s called the video replay.

The National Football League is expanding its replay system this upcoming season to include pass interference (传球干扰). Major League Baseball now relies on it for safe-or-out and home run calls. If you’ve been watching the FIFA World Cup, you may have noticed that the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) played a key role in almost every game. And in the Kentucky Derby, a horse was disqualified for knocking another horse. No one knew why until a video replay confirmed the call and controversy was avoided.

However, many purists—those who want people to follow rules carefully and do things in the traditional way—especially in soccer, argue it’s not the way the game was invented, and that the video replay is tainting the sport. But don’t you want to see the proper application of the rules throughout the games? I know I do. Yes, it can slow the game down, but I feel it is worth it. If technological advancements allow fans watching from home to spot mistakes instantly, those same views need to be available to the officiating crews. Another example occurred in the most recent National Football Conference (NFC) Championship Game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints. When obvious pass interference was committed by the Los Angeles Rams player Nickell Robey-Coleman, with just 109 seconds to play, no flag was raised on the field. It weakened the New Orleans Saints spirits. The Los Angeles Rams won a 26-23 overtime victory. The no-call deeply angered the public. The video replay showed the referees had just missed one of the most apparent pass interference calls.

There are no easy answers regarding replay technology and whether it is a curse (魔咒). But for me, keeping the officiating honest and on task is the right step in limiting controversy.

10 . Recent studies found that smiling at London bus drivers increases happiness. However, on the Number 24 bus to Hampstead Heath, Londoners are sceptical. “Bus drivers,” says. Liz Hands. a passenger. “are generally annoying me.”

It might seem improbable that a report on London’s buses could change behaviour. But it has happened before. London’s buses have an underappreciated role in the history, of medical science. In the 1940s, a single study of London’s transport workers transformed epidemiology(流行病学), medicine and the way we live now. Every time you go on a run, check your step-count, or take the stairs instead of the lift, you are following a path pioneered by the feet of the workers on London’s buses.

In the late 1940s, doctors were worried. Britain was suffering from an “epidemic” of heart disease and no one knew why. Various hypotheses(假设), such as stress, were suggested; but one thing that was not exercising researchers was exercise. The idea that health and exercise were linked “wasn’t the accepted fact that we know today”, says Nick Wareham, a professor of epidemiology at Cambridge University. Some even felt that “too much physical activity was a bad thing for your health”. Navvies, miners and farmers who did physical exercise also suffered from various diseases and died young.

At this time a young doctor called Jerry Morris started to suspect that the excess deaths from heart disease might be linked to occupation. He began studying the medical ‘records of 31, 000 London transport workers. His findings were breathtaking: conductors, who spent their time running up and down stairs, had an approximately 30% lower possibility of disease than drivers, who sat down all day. Exercise was keeping people alive.

Morris’s research was eventually published in 1953, just three years after a study by Richard Doll proving the link between smoking and lung cancer. Morris’s work had consequences both big and small. Morris now also took up exercise, handing his jacket to his daughter and just running. “People thought I was bananas.” Slowly, the rest of the world took off its jacket and followed.