How to Find Local Sports Bars

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When traveling out of town, you often seek things that make you feel more comfortable; things that allow you to relax and enjoy the atmosphere and for that matter get a drink and possibly some good food. And while we’re on the subject, why not find a spot that caters to those demands and also has a sports atmosphere along with a big screen and coverage of the latest games?

Being new to a city is always an adventure, but what if the only cultural enlightenment you’re after is a good sports bar where you can unwind and have a good time? Depending upon where you find yourself, there are several ways you might track down a good one.

First, check with a local—if you’re taking a cab, ask the cabby where he goes. If that doesn’t work, there are usually some local papers that are advertising for your business and offering the very thing you’re looking for. It almost goes without saying that you can check the local nightlife by going online and searching from there. Though this is definitely a good start, that approach is a bit like taking a shotgun where a rifle is what is needed. You will want to narrow the search.

If you’re in Canada, they have a great system for getting information and feedback on local and national offerings at Canada 411. Not only can you discover the places the locals prefer, but you can also read reviews written on the bigger name establishments.

In any case, there are ways to track down the perfect local sports bar if you know where to look.

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Having a Safe Experience with Online Gambling

If you enjoy gambling, you may find online gambling to be a fun experience. The casinos never close and there are a variety of games available to play. However, you should be careful about potential risks while playing games online.

Scams

It is easy to set up a fake website these days—domain names and hosting are both very inexpensive. To protect yourself, you should steer clear of new websites and only play at an online casino with an established reputation. Online gambling news websites can alert you to places that you should avoid; you can also ask other gamblers about safe sites to play.

Identity Theft

Identity theft can completely ruin your life. Since you have to enter your personal information like credit card numbers, you need to ensure that the website is secure. You should read the website’s security page to understand what safeguards are available. The online casino should also explain what type of encryption they use to protect your data. Otherwise, avoid it.

You also should make sure that you have virus and other computer protections because some sites may try to infect your computer as a way to obtain your private information.

Overextending Yourself

Spending too much money on gambling is easy. However, online gambling may intensify this risk because you are not actually putting green money on the table. Taking money off a credit card can be mindless because you can pay it back later. However, you need to be conscious about how much money you spend online.

Online gambling can be an enjoyable pastime if you do your research and maintain control over your spending.

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Is stretching or yoga good for body before long distance lap swimming?

Although swimming is one of the safest and least impact prone forms of exercise, long distance non stop lap swim can lead to chronic back problems if proper and methodical warm up exercise such as stretching or yoga is not performed before hand.

Animals in the wild are more attuned to their bodies than humans. lions, tigers and wolves are known to naturally engage in stretching before going for a hunting expedition or travelling long distances with their families. One of the most iconic poses for large animals such as lions is the forward and backward bend on their four legs in alternating order to loosen their musculoskeletal system.

Humans can learn a lot from animal kingdom and many stretching and yoga postures have been derived directly from animal movements which can help loosen the joints and muscles inside body before putting it to a good intense workout.

Several yoga postures such as serpent pose, lion pose, swan pose and monkey pose can help calm and loosen many crucial pressure points in the body before going ahead with a non stop long distance lap swim. The area around ankles, knee caps, thighs, glutes, upper as well as lower back, and the entire length of arms including elbows and shoulders should be stretched systematically based on modern warm up poses. Those who cannot practice yoga for religious reasons can do general stretching or pilates to warm up and condition their body before an intense lap swimming regimen.

Methodical stretching for 10-15 minutes can relax and free up all the tension inside joints and condition the heart rate and body temperature for an intense one to two hour non stop lap swim.

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Is regular swimming good for Health?

Swimming is one of the favorite exercises among people of every major demographic.  Whether you are young, middle aged or old, man or a woman, obese or thin, swimming is beneficial for health in every demographic category.

Swimming regularly at least three to four times a week has been proven to be excellent for heart, musculoskeletal system and provides a good work out for almost every major organ in the body.  Swimming also has advantages over other aerobic exercises such as running, walking and cycling since it does not create sudden impact on joints in the musculoskeletal system due to water’s soft resistance.

Aerobic exercises such as running, brisk walking and cycling specially on hard surfaces such as walkways made of concrete, asphalt coated roads or stationary treadmills can lead to extensive wear and tear and adverse impact on joints. Many athletes such as basketball players, soccer players and American football players face persistent problems with their knees, ankles and spinal columns which exacerbates over many years if long period of rest and recuperation is not involved. Therefore running as a form of aerobic exercise cannot be sustained for many years by professional athletes as well as general public without a long list of injuries.

On the other hand regular swimming provides the same benefits as running or cycling without damaging joints over a period of time. Regular swimming can therefore be undertaken without any side effects in the long run. Swimming is also very helpful for those who suffer from chronic heart problems, arthritis, and is proven to be helpful for accident victims with spinal injuries.  People with arthritis might find excruciatingly painful to run or even walk, but they can easily do light swimming and keep themselves healthy in the long run.

Regular swimming is perhaps one of the best sports for overall mind body well being as it provides impact free workout, is sustainable over the long term and facilitates mental focus.

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An Athlete’s Appetite

When you start to swim, or really to do any sport that requires a lot of moving around, you are going to notice something about how you eat.  Namely, that you are going to be wanting to eat a good deal more than you did before you started with your athletic regimen.  Naturally, you are going to be burning more calories while you train than you did back when your greatest athletic endeavor was going from the couch to the fridge and back during the commercial break.  It has been said that some of the most active athletes (such as Michael Phelps) can eat 12,000 calories in a day, without any significant changes to their body composition.  If that sounds incredible, you have never seen what a lot of professional athletes have to go through in their training.

If you want to be a great athlete, you have got to eat.  Unless you want to be as anorexic and weak as a lot of European models are, you have got to replenish the calories that you burn off while you work out.  As great as it is to be slim and trim, it is possible to take it to an unhealthy level.  You will know that you are malnourished when, in spite of a lot of great workouts and some decent rest periods, you are not recovering (let alone improving) to the extent that you know you should be doing.

In order to repair your body properly, you have got to eat.  If possible, eat six to eight times a day, balancing it between roughly forty percent carbs, thirty percent proteins and thirty percent fats.  Naturally, you could just scarf pizzas, burgers and fries all day long.  But if you do that, you will probably notice that you are not getting up to your maximum potential.  Keep in mind that no matter how hard you work out, you are what you eat no matter what.

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A Slow Heart Rate

When you start to really exercise with vigor, you are going to notice a very peculiar change in your body, and a lot of people will be afraid at first.  But there is absolutely no reason to be afraid of this.  It is nothing more than your resting heart rate going lower and lower, until it reaches a level that can rightfully be called “conditioned.”  Granted, it is possible for a person’s heart rate to be too low, but you should not be in any danger of that happening to you.  After all, you most likely had a physical before you started working out.  And if you do not have any negative symptoms (and you probably do feel great), there is more than likely not anything wrong with you.

What a lot of people do not realize about your heart is that it is a muscle, much like your abs.  Most folks do not think of their abs first when a muscle comes to mind, but they are the same slow twitch variety that characterize your heart (except that your heart has a few differences to it).  When you condition a set of muscles, they obviously become stronger.  If you condition your abs, it becomes easier for you to do things such as standing, running and lifting heavy objects.  And when you condition your heart, it becomes easier for it to beat.

When it is easier for your heart to beat, you can sit there with it only beating every couple of seconds.  Seriously, you can get your heart rate down to 30 beats per minute without any kind of health risk (provided you do not have any heart conditions).  The stronger your heart gets, the less it has to beat- but when it does have to open up the proverbial throttle, you will be happy for every ounce of strength it can summon up.  There is nothing like a competition to kick it up.

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Building a Strong Body

There is a lot more to being good at any given sport than just having a strong body.  But of course, those other topics are for other articles.  In this one, we are going to talk about how you can go from wherever you happen to be right now (and it is all right if you are a little less than mighty, or even an absolute wimp) to where you want to be.  Even Hercules had to train himself, to become the strongest man in the world.  And if the sons of Greek gods have to do it, you do, too.  You can train for strength using weights, yoga and pilates, standard calisthenics, and through cardio.  They all have their place, if you want to build a well rounded, powerfully muscles athletic machine.

First off, not everybody who is very strong lifts weights.  You can develop a lot of power and stamina through calisthenics and other bodyweight centered exercises.  While you can train yourself in a lot of unusual angles if you add weights into the mixture, they are not critical.  But you are going to need to push (and pull) yourself through a lot of movements, if you are going to develop your muscles and joints into what they are going to need to be for a solid athletic performance.

Naturally, yoga and pilates are great ways to condition your muscles into solid, flexible powerhouses (yes, that is a pilates joke).  But when you do more traditional calisthenics like pushups, pullups and squats, you can condition yourself for greater stamina and power.  Just remember that to keep your cardiovascular endurance up to where it has to be, you need to cross train, too.  Swimming, biking and running are all great ways to do that, as well as skipping rope.  Basically, anything that forces you to push yourself out of your comfort zone is going to cause you get stronger.  Just keep pushing the envelope.

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Could Your Local Swimming Pool Be a Disease Carrier?

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Millions of Americans chose swimming as a way to get fit and have some fun, especially in the summer months. Public pools are accessible to most neighborhoods, and they offer open-swim sessions year round. Pools are also a common feature in many private health clubs, fitness centers and hotels.

With all these swimmers sharing the same pools, it’s vital to be aware of water-borne germs that can make you and your family sick. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even has a name for infectious ailments caused by germs in pools: recreational water illnesses (RWI). These illnesses include a wide variety of infections: gastrointestinal, respiratory, skin and wound, to name a few. The water-borne illness reported most commonly is diarrhea.

Used Properly, Chlorine Kills Germs—But Not Right Away

Just one swimmer with diarrhea can contaminate the water in a swimming pool, even if it’s Olympic sized. Other swimmers can ingest those germs by swallowing small amounts of water.

Isn’t chlorine supposed to kill these germs? Yes, chlorine does destroy most contaminants—but only if the chlorine is used at proper disinfection levels and if water conditions (pH and temperature) are ideal. But even when chlorine is properly used, some contaminants are chlorine tolerant. These germs will eventually succumb to chlorine, but it might take hours—or even days. In the meantime, those germs are swimming in the pool along with all the humans.

How to Protect Yourself, Your Family and Other Swimmers

You can avoid spreading and catching pool-borne germs by taking a few precautions.

• Don’t swallow pool water. Instruct children to try not to get pool water in their mouths at all.
• Before you get in the water, shower with soap. Wash your hands thoroughly after changing diapers or using the bathroom.
• Don’t go swimming when you have diarrhea. Don’t take children swimming when they have diarrhea.
• Check children’s diapers often.
• Don’t change children’s diapers at poolside. Germs can end up in the pool.

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Stretching and swimming

Like all athletic past times and exercises proper stretching of all the muscle groups is a must. Aside from playing a major factor in preventing injuries like strains and pulled muscles, proper stretching can also improve muscle growth.

For swimming there are a few key stretches to consider. It’s important to properly warm up shoulders and arms, as those are the two areas where swimmers are most likely to experience some sort of injury.

The key to good stretching is flexibility. One basic stretch for warming up before entering the pool is to reach upward with each arm alternately, pressing the ear flat and reaching as high as possible. A good thing to keep in mind here is a nice, straight line. It might be tempting to pull or lean forward, but it’s key to maintain a nice, 180 degree line from your heels to your finger tips.

Another good stretch for improving flexibility is the bridge. By bridging your back upward off the ground, you can bring your shoulders in line with your head. If you can’t straighten your legs at first, that’s normal. Try elevating your feet by placing them on the couch or a stack of gym mats.

There are also a number of yoga poses which will help with flexibility and with stretching over all, so it’s worth the time to learn a few basics. A beginner’s yoga reference guide will have some good places to start.

In the end a lot of the traditional arm stretches are going to be good for warming up. Pulling your arm across your chest and stretching the deltoids; pulling your elbow behind your back; locking your arms behind your back and pulling up toward your head.

Just remember, the key is to feel a warm, stretching sensation. If you are feeling acute pain then you are doing it wrong, or need to warm up more slowly.

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Teaching Swimming

Teaching adults and children to swim can be a wonderful experience. However, people tend to get scared easily around water, so you want to make sure you make the interaction fun and exciting for everyone.

You want to make sure that the first thing you do is teach water safety. Explain all the rules of the pool area and enforce that people follow the rules carefully. Stress the importance of not running near the pool area, because it is very easy to slip and fall in the water, even maybe hitting your head on the way down.

When teaching children to swim, make sure you have a lot of toys in the water. Children are attracted to bright things and by having many toys around, they will be more likely to listen in order to get to play with the toys.

For people that have never swam before, make sure to take it slow. You may only be able to get some of the students to put their feet in the water the first day. That is okay, as it takes some time to adjust to being in the water. Don’t expect a lot from your students on the first day. Let them advance in the class at their own speed.

You want the student to feel comfortable and confident with you. If you push them when they aren’t ready, then they are not going to trust you and will either get angry with you, scared, or not come back to the class. If at the end of the class a person has only managed to step into the water, that’s okay. That’s further than they got in the beginning of the class.

By having a fun and relaxed environment for your students, they will be more than happy to learn how to swim. They will also bring others to your class to learn.

Filed Under: Excercises, Swimming
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