It Was A Good Day

Yesterday, I was busy practically the entire day with very little leisure time. In the spare time I did have, I was working on homework assignments, two projects, and studying. I ended up going to bed at around 6am and having to wake up three hours later for a heavy load of classes from 10am to 5pm (with 1.5 hrs of breaktime in between). I didn't get to eat anything or to nap the entire day...but I couldn't have asked for a better day.


I stayed awake for my first class, Motor, Growth, and Development. That's already an extraordinary feat in itself. As a matter of fact, I was quite attentive even. Hmm...I don't know why I'm not usually attentive. It's a really interesting class and the professor is one-of-a-kind. Anyways, the topic today was Fine Motor Development. Usually, this refers to precise movements, such as drawing...WHICH WE DID IN CLASS TODAY!!!


For the last seven minutes of class, everyone drew people....any kind of person they pleased. We just had to draw human beings and draw until the class was over. It's quite a sight seeing 150 college students drawing cartoon-y persons in class. Some students were really artistic, others no so much. Some really creative and, again, others not so much. However, everyone was having fun...including myself. That's a darn skippy awesomely fun activity! 


For the rest of the day, I was alive and kicking in all my classes. My head hurt and my fine motor skill was a bit off, but my brain was working better than ever. I was recalling info we learned in previous lectures, asking questions, answering questions--Henry Guan's brain was on a rolllll. I haven't felt this good in class for a while. This semester, my student-self was really lost. He didn't enjoy classes the way he used to. It was very upsetting. For the most part, classes were a drag. However, today was very refreshing. It was like a revival, if you will...like the Renaissance? Was the Renaissance a revival of the classics or something? What am I talking about? Anyways, as I was saying, today was very, very refreshing. I needed some refreshing.


In KIN 240, my professor was cracking jokes left and right. KNEE SLAPPERS, FOR REAL! It was kind of embarrassing laughing. I know he's a funny guy, but is he usually this funny? That witty, clever, witty, clever man. He made my day EVEN better. But but but but but....after class, it was all raining outside and I hate the rain and I was like "Ugh." But but but but....it wasn't even bad. I actually enjoyed the weather very much. This rainy weather was very odd. It was raining but it was also very bright and sunny. Very, very odd. Somehow, the light rain and bright sun was a really beautiful combination. NOICE!!


Blee bloo blah fling phlegm...I'm talking too much. Fast forward to 3pm when I had my exam. EEK! It took two hours to finish that tedious exam, but I'M FINALLY DONE WITH IT! Yeah.....I've still got exams for all my other classes, but it's been really hectic this week because of that one class. BUT IT'S FINALLY OVER! And guess what I did right after the exam. I pooped. :3 Good day times a million.


What this whole bunch o' jargon sums up to is that today was a Nate-the-Great day even though I wouldn't have expected it to be. Who would think 3 hours of sleep, full schedule, and an exam would make a good day? It's strange how things turned out, but I am really happy for this day. I'll try to make all my days like this. "Bring it." Bad circumstances can't get me down. There's always something good. 

Photo Credits to Becky Guan 

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....so cute. I felt like this post maybe needed a picture, so why not one of Joe.

"Wahhh"

Bat! Camel!

I am nineteen years old, and I cannot hit a baseball tossed at me very well AT ALL. I'm pretty sure some of my little cousins would be better than me. I don't have an excuse...until now!!

Today, in KIN 262 (Motor, Growth, and Development), the topic was skill acquisition. When learning motor skills such as walking, running, hopping, skipping, throwing, catching, striking (batting counts as this)...etc, what determines how well these skills mature? 

I'm sure when an infant has his/her first steps, it's still pretty noobsauce McNuggets. The infant's gait will be very flat-footed, arms are out or up to help with balance, and steps are small and slow. Now compared to our gait patterns, we step from heel-to-toe, our arms are comfortably at our sides, and are steps can be long and quick but still very precise.


"OH!! I see!! It's because we're older!! We're better at walking because we're older!!" 

How about a skill such as throwing? I think for throwing, it's really unfair to compare the throwing ability of an infant to one of an adolescent or teenager, but does throwing ability necessarily reach mature levels as you age?

For some people, it may seem obvious to assume that skills mature because we mature...age-wise, but it gets more complicated when we examine other skills such as throwing and catching...or batting.


Of course, while you age, your central nervous system continues to develop and that makes coordinating your movements and actions more efficient because your neurons are able to communicate better, but that won't get you that far. It's practice, buddy. The more one practices a skill, the better he/she will become at it. And coincidentally with walking, age goes hand-in-hand with practice. Or it should be. If a toddler has taken more steps than a perfectly able nineteen year old, I'll be worried. Skills emerge through stages. It's a progression of a skill going from an immature stage to mastery level. So with more and more practice, skill ability will continue to improve through the stages.

HA! So there's my excuse for why my batting is so suck...I just don't have enough practice.

Ooh ooh ... I just randomly thought of something. Back then, when my little cousins and I were all younger, they would always associate me being better at stuff because I'm "older." I call bull-spit on them now! It's only because I had more practice.


Ooh ooh ... I just had another thought. So the other day, I was playing volleyball with Eileen, and we tried to serve with our left hand. In the pathetic attempts, I found that my left hand didn't really know what it was doing. With my right hand, it's very clear how to coordinate proper form to execute a basic overhand serve. However, my left hand would get everything wrong. My torso is twisting with it instead of just facing my target, my elbow is very close to my side instead of freely away from my body, and instead of an overhand motion swinging all the way through I had a crouched-arm-shooting-upward-to-catch-a-fly motion. This may be due to lack of practice as well. Just as my right hand was in its infantile stages when first learning the skill, my left hand is at that stage because, for it, this is when it's first learning the overhand serve. Before I can perform the skill well with my left hand, it has to go through the stages of skill development too...with practice.



UH....CAMEL!!

Firefighter Training

Woo ha! I feel so energized at 7:30am!! Okay...not really. I got up today at 5:45am, because I had to go down to the Firefighter Institute in Champaign to conduct simple fitness assessment on the firefighters there. We assess their fitness now and after their 6-week training program and basically see how well they've improved.


This was for my research lab by the way. Not that I've ever mentioned it really in my previous posts yet, but I'm in a research lab called the Exercise Psychophysiology Lab (ExPPL). Primarily, our focus is the effects of exercise on more cognitive and psychological factors. This fitness assessment, however, just evaluates the consequences of exercise on physical health. It doesn't seem to correlate well with our lab's focus and it seems obvious that "DUH! If you exercise, you'll get stronger and improve your physical fitness and body composition," but the lab has been conducting this research for a long, long time now before the benefits of exercise were so well-known. We continue the research just as something cool.


Anyways, the new firefighters took part in the following assessments: weight, bench press test, sit-and-reach flexibility test, waist-to-hip ratio, and skinfold tests (which measures subcutaneous, outermost, layer of fat at specific spots on the body).


I WAS IN CHARGE OF THE WAIST-TO-HIP RATIO!! It's not the most exciting job, but I was still really happy that they actually made me responsible for one of the tests instead of just having me observe or whatever. It's a pretty simple task, but it was still really fun and I wasn't nervous. When the three groups walked in, I would announce that I'll be taking their waist-to-hip ratios, waist being the smallest part of the torso usually around the belly button area and hip being where the hip bone is, and in order to get an accurate measurement, the guys and girl would need to roll up their sweatshirts a bit. After the announcement, they would step up one-by-one and I'll do my thing.


Since this test is relatively fast compared to the others, I had free time so I measured my own circumferences. My waist is 28 inches and my hip is 29 inches. My head is 21 inches. And I couldn't measure my chest by myself...and it was awkward to ask someone else to help me. I also did sit-and-reach. I was surprised... I got a sit-and-reach score of 10 inches. I'm positive that is more than I was in grade school. YAY!! I want to try their bench test too. Both guys and girls had to complete bench presses matching a certain rhythm set by a  metronome. There was 0% incline on the benches, the guys used 85 lbs, and the girl used 35 lbs. There isn't a standard for how well either sex is supposed to do since this is only measuring improvement or decline in fitness, but the highest # of reps a guy was able to do to the rhythm was 70 reps and the girl did 20 reps. Really impressive on both parts.