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.

2 . It’s no surprise that there’s a link between exercise and mental health. But scientists have now made it official: research has found a direct connection between movement and mood. Why does exercise hold so many benefits for our mental health?     1    .

When our muscles tighten, chains of amino acids (氨基酸) called myokines (肌细胞因子) are released into the bloodstream.     2    . This communication increases adaptation to stress, reduces symptoms of anxiety and has a direct effect on depression.

A recent study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showed that treatment for depression can be much more effective when physical activity is added to the usual care.     3    . “While exercise is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment, physical activity can complement and enhance the effects of the treatment,” says lead researcher Ben Singh, a research fellow at the University of South Australia. He says regular exercise in a group setting can boost self-esteem and decrease feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Exercise helps build key connections between the networks within the brain, too.     4    . Studies have shown that physical activity stimulates creativity, sharpens judgement skills and improves mental energy. It can also help to slow age-related cognitive decline, possibly even slowing the pace of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

    5    . In this way you’ll keep going back to them. Experts suggest that you aim for a minimum of 10 to 30 minutes, three to five days each week. Getting sweaty is good for your body and mind.

3 . The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled over the past 50 years. But what this trend means for children’s long-term health, and what to do about it (if anything), is not so clear.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans.     1     This advice marks a shift from the organization’s previous stance of “watch and wait,” and it reflects the AAP’s belief that obesity is a disease and the group’s adoption of a more proactive position on childhood obesity.

Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain — and the guidelines acknowledge these barriers. Few weight-loss drugs have been approved for older children, although many are used off-label.     2     And surgery, while becoming more common, has inherent risks and few long-term safety data — it could, for instance, cause nutritional deficits in growing children. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether interventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to the stigma overweight kids face from a fat-phobic society. This stigma can lead to mental health problems and eating disorders.

Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, the U.S. and countries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.

    3    In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, unsurprisingly, that kids’ sports participation increases with their parents’ incomes: about 70 percent of kids whose families earn more than $105,000 a year participate in sports, but only 51 percent of middle-class kids and 31 percent of children at or below the poverty line do. This disparity hurts people of color the most. More than 60 percent of white children, for instance, participate in athletics, but only 42 percent of Black children and 47 percent of Hispanic children do. Experts blame these problems on the privatization of sports — as public investment in school-based athletics dwindles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, children between ages six and 17 should get at least an hour of moderate to intense physical activity every day. Yet only 21 to 28 percent of U.S. kids meet this target, two government-sponsored surveys found. The nonprofit Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance evaluates physical activity in American children, and in 2022 the group gave the U.S. a grade of D–.

Why is it so hard to get kids moving? In addition to fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased screen time, changing norms around letting kids play outdoors unsupervised, and a lack of safe places for them to play outside the home.

New York City, for example, had 2,067 public playgrounds as of 2019 — a “meager” amount for its large population, according to a report from the city comptroller — and inspectors found hazardous equipment at one quarter of them. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of youths lived within walking distance of a park, according to the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to have the fewest public play spaces, despite often having a high population density.     4    

Kids everywhere need more places to play: trails, skate parks and climbing walls, gardens and ball fields, bike paths and basketball courts. Vigorous public funding to build and keep up these areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements can make unused spaces available to the public.

5 . 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.

8 . Online training is one of the fastest growing parts of the fitness industry. If you’re considering joining the online fitness community, consider these benefits and drawbacks.

One of the most popular reasons for working out following an online video is that it offers ultimate convenience. No need to roll out of bed at 5 a. m. to attend that 6 a. m. boot camp class, which may end up being full when you arrive.    1    And what if you’re on the road? No problem. You can access your workout video through your phone.

    2    Most online fitness programs are much less expensive than similar offline programs—most range in cost from $ 10 to $ 20 per month. Some are even free. For example, the online Les Mills+program offers a free 30-day trial of its 1,500-plus workouts.

Online training also has broad offerings. When you head online, you have instructors from around the globe, all ready and willing to help you master your favorite moves.    3    Just because there isn’t a Krav Maga class in your area doesn’t mean you can’t go online to find one led by qualified instructors.

All these are undoubtedly positive-online training provides fitness resources to general consumers wherever they are, without requiring access to a gym or fitness studio.    4    

Very few online fitness programs enable the instructor to see you, check your form, and offer corrections based on your performance.    5    This is particularly concerning for beginners, as they’re more likely to do incorrectly. Besides, if you struggle with self-motivation and prefer a social workout environment, online fitness may not be for you.

9 . Some people prefer to have a bite to eat before hitting the gym, known as a fed workout. Others would like to wait until after exercising to refuel their bodies, called a fasted workout.    1     Many experts say there’s no easy answer because it depends on the person.

If you want energy and strength for an ideal workout, you need fuel. A fed workout will provide your body with power. Eating before exercise may help you sustain longer sessions and lift heavier weights.     2     Muscle preservation is also an essential component of strengthening your body. Nitrogen (氮) is critical for processing protein that builds healthy muscles. People tend to lose less nitrogen during a fed workout than a fasted one.

Many fitness enthusiasts are not on board with this idea. They report feeling sick and inactive while trying to exercise after eating. With a fasted workout, you may not get the usual indigestion. Experts for fasted workouts further claim that eating afterwards makes your body use its fat reserves for energy, meaning you will burn more fat.     3     It can cause a sudden drop in your blood glucose (葡萄糖) levels, and you may feel dizzy. You may even be more likely to overeat.

    4     Not all foods are created equal. For example, if you choose a fed workout, you’ll probably lose a lot of water during an intense training, so you should consider drinking some beforehand. With a fasted workout, it would help if you had some nutrition right after your session is complete. Drink some water. Then, have a light meal or nutritional snack.

Deciding when to eat for an ideal workout is a personal choice. Both fasted workouts and fed activities have their benefits and shortcomings.     5    

10 . Can Exercise Make You More Creative?

If you often exercise, there is a good chance you also tend to be more creative, according to a study of the links between physical activity and imagination. The study, which was published in Scientific Reports, finds that active people come up with more and better ideas during tests of their inventiveness than people who are relatively sedentary.

Science already offers plenty of evidence that physical activity influences how we think. Many studies on people and animals show that our brains change in response to physical activity, in part because during exercise we marinate(浸泡)our brains with extra blood, oxygen and nutrients. In rodent(啮齿动物)studies, animals that regularly exercise produce far more new brain cells than sedentary counterparts, even if they are elderly.     1    .

However, creativity is one of the most abstract of thinking skills, and its relationship with exercise has not been clear. Some past research had speculated that good moods might be the intermediary inking activity and creativity. According to that idea, moving makes people happier, and their good cheer in turn stimulates their creativity.     2    .

To learn more about how being active could possibly affect creativity in the first place, researchers at the University of Graz in Austria tracked the normal activities of a group of healthy adults.     3     Then they asked them to visit the lab and let their imaginations soar, conceiving new uses for car tires and umbrellas and finishing partial drawings. The researchers then rated their output on its originality and other measures. The volunteers also completed standardized questionnaires about their moods.

Crosschecking the data, the scientists found that the most active of the volunteers proved to be also the most creative, especially if they often walked or exercised moderately. Active people also tended to be in high spirits, although their moods were highest if they engaged in vigorous activities, rather than moderate ones. However, the correlations between activity, creativity and moods were slight.     4    

The study was associational, though, meaning that it looked at a brief moment in people’s lives. It did not involve a randomized experiment and cannot tell us how exercise and other activities might shape creativity, if not by raising moods, or show whether a brisk walk now helps us better finish a newspaper column or some other creative venture later. But the results do suggest that active imaginations start with active lives.