About sport, health and other bullshits

All these Olympic days we can hear everywhere how sport helps to reach values and be healthy. Respect to health, it is a common place to consider sport as the best way to increase life quality and life quantity. In my opinion, sport is just a single word to describe a complex human activity. So, if I had to answer the question of sport as a source of health, after sixteen years being a high performance trainer in athletics, I would say: maybe.

First of all, we should classified what kind of activities exist inside the word ‘sport’ in order to analyze whether it is a health practice or not, so I divide sport in four activities:

1) Fitness
2) Formative
3) Competitive
4) Professional

Fitness
It is all kind of exercises to prevent illness, reduce daily stress and to obtain an improvement in mental health. Subjects who practice Fitness have to practice at least 3 days a week, more than 45 min. each session in aerobic way, that is, less than 160 heart rate per minute, avoiding high impact exercises in order to prevent injuries in muscles, bones and joints.

Formative
I mean physical activity, especially in children, aimed to learn how human body works, sport skills for a better carrying out of merely for not to be injured and as a way of social values promoting.

Competitive
Amateur competition, usually training 3-4 days a week directed toward competition once a week or a month. It needs an important work to get the goal: the victory. Since amateur, it is a hobby, no reason to exceed own limits.

Professional
It is a high performance sport, a profession, a way of showing the art of movement. The objective one: to be the best (without tricks, of course). The rest of aspects are behind main goal, to be the number one. It is not healthy at all, neither unhealthy, this is a profession, and none of us go to work thinking in improving healthy, don´t we? An artist look for art masterpiece and so an athlete does, as a singer, a dancer, a painter,etc. They ‘invest’ 4, 5, 6 hours a day to get the ‘profit’ of victory.

Regardless of whether we like or not, professional sportsmen protect their selves with the appropriate equipment and medical check-ups, care their careers to extend their sport lives. But, what about three previous categories? What about the so-named “healthy sport” in opposition to professional sport?

In a normal day we can find hazardous situations as people starving on diet, children trained as adults, amateur runners running distances they are not adapted to go, women walking in high heels, youngster in first contact with drugs trying to get a bigger muscles, friends playing tennis at 14:00 hours in summer, parents forcing sons to be succeeded sportsmen, amateurs working in a gym for hours without any objective but to get some muscle, young girls mistreating their bodies to fit a size less bikini, and so on. Thousands of examples of health risks in no professional sports.

In conclusion, sport is healthy or not depending on what kind of sport you want to practice and to follow their rules in order to not trespassing limits a person has. First what do you want to do, later to practice, in this order.

Regarding professional sport nobody should find health or illness in it, it is a job, like yours. Should Picasso have stopped to paint because inks and oil paintings were a threat to his lungs? Is sport a risk of health? Maybe, specially no professional sport.

AN INCONVENIENT JOKE

(Commenting an extract of http://www.climatecrisis.net/)

--Buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs.
(And later you can re-use bulbs in your Christmas tree and spend the power saved).

--Use clock and thermostats to reduce energy for heating and cooling.
(They are always more expensive and can be working 24 hours a day even if you are not at home)

--Weatherize your house: increase insulation (against neighbours parties mostly)

--Recycle (recycler enterprises will save a lot of money thanks to your help)

--Switch to renewable sources of energy (more subventioned, insufficient and clean –in this order)

--Call your power company to see if they offer green energy. If they don’t ask them why not. (Ask how happy they are thanks to your energy saving)

--Plant trees, lots of trees (and later built resorts and golf courses around)

--Speak up in your community. Spread the word (explain how China, India an others are spending in a few seconds what you are saving in a month. Spread the message that every time you leave your car to get a bicycle, a Chinese is doing just the opposite)

--Join international efforts to stop global warming. (Contribute to stop historical glaciations, 3500.000.000 is enough. Move the asteroids, specially the sun –but do it by night, risk of sunburns)


--Raise fuel economy standard: require lower emission from automobiles (Use bio fuel, so crops are more expensive and famine can be extended in the poorest countries)

--Learn as much as you can about climate change (Watch Al Gore’s film and discover the 8 errors)

--Change the world time twice a year (all energy a country can save is exactly the same that its antipode country can lost, moreover you will go later at work once a year –usually a Monday- cause you forgot to change the alarm clock )

--Then put your knowledge into action (Meet detractor scientists and favourable ones to get the “Big Truth” and later demonise atheists of the new religion)

“Hope is always the first thing I lose” Anonymous

Olympic Spirit vs Human Rights Spirit

It is very sad, as my double condition*, to see how sport is bei(ji)ng used to promote material development before human rights all over the world. I support protests against Beijing Olympic Games. “Olympic Spirit” is very important, but Human Rights Spirit is a superior ideal. The opposite is hypocrisy, if so, that wouldn’t be the sport that once I believed in. Today, Olympic spirit means to stop the torch relay in its way to China.

*Athletics National Trainer. Sub-16 Spanish National Team staff in Javelin Throw and, in the other hand, Amnesty International cyber volunteer against death penalty and torture.

Woman's living in bathroom may lead to criminal case

By Edie Hall - The Hutchinson News - ehall@hutchnews.com
The Ness County Sheriff's office is considering charges in the case of a woman who had not left her boyfriend's bathroom in approximately two years.While the investigation is ongoing, Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said his office is "possibly looking into" charges against the woman's boyfriend of mistreatment of a dependent adult.Whipple declined to give the woman's name or her boyfriend's name.In late February, the woman's boyfriend called the sheriff's office and alerted them that something was wrong with his girlfriend. When police arrived, they found the woman sitting on the toilet - a position from which they believe she had not moved for approximately two years. Her boyfriend had sustained her by bringing food and water.Whipple said the woman's muscles had atrophied and that medical personnel had to remove her from the toilet because she was bound to it by "natural means." Currently, the woman is being treated at a Wichita hospital. So far, she has not cooperated with police by granting an interview, and therefore some of the details - such as how she slept or why she went into the bathroom in the first place - are not yet clear. Whipple is hopeful that mental health workers can soon do an evaluation to establish her mental capabilities and her dependence on her boyfriend.Whipple said his office will not be able to determine whether the woman stayed in the bathroom of her own free will, as her boyfriend claims, until the mental evaluation is complete. "With her actions she has kind of supported his claims because when we found her she initially refused ambulance service," Whipple said. "The situation was serious enough that we called the ambulance anyway - but she didn't want to leave." Both the woman and her boyfriend are originally from Ness County, Whipple said, adding that the woman did have family in the area, but that she "didn't have much to do with them."