- Explain your favorite or most cherished athletic/exercise accomplishment.
- My favorite athletic accomplishment was getting my town’s Player of Year position for women’s soccer my senior year of high school. Every year my town takes all high schools in the area and has coaches discussion who the best player is the county. I won, I got a mini photo and had my photo displayed across the county on the newspaper. It was a major honor, that year we won our sectional title for the 5th year in a row, also my fifth time winning because we won our first sectional title my 8th grade year when I first joined the team. It was a nice way to finish off my senior soccer career at my high school, and was a nice way to get a coach’s attention for college soccer. I was able to tell coaches that I had won that prize and that had helped me gain a spot here on Union College Women’s Soccer Team.
- Why do you think exercise physiology can serve as a paradigm for understanding biology?
- I believe learning exercise physiology is imperative to understanding biology because it involves the animals and most importantly us. We study mice, monkeys and other animals in order to create medicine and figure out how the human body works. Learning this class, helps you understand what animals do to stay at their correct temperature, and normal bodily function. You also learn and understand the general makeup of why animals look the way they do, why birds have hollow bones, why we have so many bones, muscles and tendons. Also, the effects of exercise to our own bodies, understanding that can keep you healthy for longer, as well as your loved ones. This class will help you understand organisms on a fundamental level, and can help other people understand biology as a whole.
- How can you use what you learned in previous upper-level courses to contribute to our exercise physiology discussions?
- In previous terms I have taken, Developmental Biology, Epigenetics, and Neurobiology and I feel that they have all helped build a foundation for this class. Each class spoke on a molecular level of how/why organisms are made the way they are. Now, this class I will learn the next level up, on a larger level of how organisms function. Developmental spoke a lot of how the body plan was set up, and I believe that will help my understanding of where the bones, ligaments and organs are set up and their function. I feel like Development was from fertilization to when the organism was born and this class will continue from when the organism was born to its maturation. I’ll be able to understand why certain animals are so small and what the advantages are to that, and why certain animals are formed differently than us and what are the results of those differences. For example I know that snakes have an extended torso in the body plan, and now I will learn how that extended torso helps or limits it’s mobility.
Bio 375: Exercise Physiology
Spring 2019
1. That’s definitely a huge accomplishment and something to be proud of. Getting those pictures is something that you can remember that award forever. Winning sectionals is also a great accomplishment especially five years in a row. Nothing is better than finishing out your high school career with a sectional title.
2. It is definitely important to understand how the human body works. Knowing how different animals behave or adapt to their environments in order to maintain homeostasis is very important. Every animal and species is different in their own way to have the best survival skills. Understanding the reasons why some animals look the way they do is so they can survive to the best of their abilities. Now since people are living longer than they used to in the past it is good to understand how exercise effects our bodies and how we can use it to benefit ourselves.
3. Epigenetics sounds like a pretty interesting class. I can see how it could be helpful to our class this term. Most other classes do focus on the molecular level like you said and it is important to understand the foundation before working our way up to a bigger picture. Having this previous knowledge from other classes can definitely contribute to the topics we talk about in class whether it is a direct relation or if it is understanding it on a deeper level.
Hi Morgan!
Great post. Wow that really is an accomplishment and what a way to end your high school soccer career! You won the section five times in a row? That’s actually unreal. Where are you from? And agreed, that definitely could not hurt in getting college coaches’ attention.
So as a collegiate soccer player, I am sure you are very familiar with endurance and pushing the human body to its limits. My experience on the crew team has definitely pushed the boundaries of my body’s cardiovascular performance. This winter before my injury I was in great shape and it seemed that the more weight I could lift (bench press, deadlifts, etc), the better my cardiovascular performance was on the rowing machines… strength and endurance must be related. But similarly to you, my best athletic achievement was in high school senior year winning the baseball state championship in NY.
Agreed, exercise physiology will definitely help us understand biology more completely. I think that the mechanisms that govern performance during exercise (on a cellular or organismal level) may be reflections or even exaggerations of what takes place on a normal basis. When you put the body under stress to metabolize faster, it might help us highlight what takes place on a day to day basis. Here are a couple other thoughts: (1) we already talked about negative feedback loops like the pH of the blood and respiration rates, so I am guessing that feedback loops in general play an important role in exercise physiology. I have noticed in my other classes that feedback loops pop up a lot in biology, so maybe studying them in exercise physiology will help us understand how they work in other biological systems. (2) Also, maybe studying comparative exercise physiology can help us characterize phylogenetic trees which would help biologists understand evolution further! And, (3) on Wednesday we talked about sensors, integrators and effectors. Studying how these biological components work and communicate with each other may help us understand what occurs on a biochemical level. Or maybe it is the other way around, understanding what takes place biochemically can help us understand exercise physiology to a greater extent.
Throwback to developmental!! The subcellular biology classes will definitely help us understand exercise physiology. Some of what you talk about sounds like comparative vertebrate anatomy, but I agree structure is related to function so to understand physiology we must first understand anatomy. I’m excited to take physiology to the next level – studying it when the body is put to stress (i.e. exercise). How much of our exercise physiology can be explained by what our ancestors physically needed to do to survive? Chasing down big game might explain our great long-distance endurance running ability. In this way, I can see history playing an important role in exercise physiology. I believe just having had discussions in previous upper-level science classes will help make our discussions in this class great – practice makes perfect. I can even see the material in BIO 112 – anatomy and physiology of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems – helping to contribute to our discussions in this class. Can’t wait to learn more!
See you soon,
Tommy
Morgan: Great post! I enjoyed learning about your high school achievements. Wow. I played in soccer in high school but was never county player of the year.
Nicole and Tommy — thanks for your thoughtful responses