My most cherished athletic moment was switching over from skiing to snowboarding. My entire life I was a skier and then in my senior year of high school I decided I wanted to switch to snowboarding. I figured it couldn’t be that hard, they both involve the same concept: to get down the mountain. Once I did my first run I realized that the muscle groups and coordination for skiing and snowboarding are completely different. I had to switch from relying mainly on the glutes and hips to now involving your hamstrings and calves to turn onto your heels or toes. I was terrified and didn’t think I would be able to make the switch, but after many failed attempts, I made it down the mountain without falling. I knew that I had pushed myself into trying something new and now I have the ability to ski or snowboard which is an activity that I love to do!

I think exercise physiology is a great foundation for other biological sciences. Exercise is not only vital for daily life because movement is how we can be productive, but it is also a form of stress that can lead as an example for other biological processes. When the body starts to exercise, the nervous system starts to put the body into a state of stress and every system is activated in some way. The way our muscles, heart, bones, hormones, etc. respond to this stress is different for each animal and also for each individual. Learning the physiology of our body’s response system to exercise will help us understand how these systems interact with one another and how we can learn to maximize these processes for top performance. Starting with exercise physiology, studying this will then lead to other fields of biology including how exercise response changes over time, how it changes when things are imbalance, and how it can change across animal kingdoms.

I think taking human A&P 1 and 2 will definitely help to understand exercise physiology because once you know the body parts and systems, it will make more sense to now learn how they interact under exercise. I also think taking microbiology will help to understand what happens when we get sick. Having an infection of some sort will have an impact on the levels of lymphocytes and cytokines in your blood which will obviously affect our ability to perform. Also taking life science physics helps with an understanding of the mechanics of flexion and extension, and why if one muscle is weak it can impact the entire process of walking or picking something up.