Hello and welcome to my blog about physical fitness and how to achieve that goal. If this is your first time visiting, please take a look at my past posts. Get fit don’t quit provides an introduction to the problems that physical inactivity causes and provides tips that you can follow to start your fitness journey, while is bad information stopping you from reaching your goals informs you about how good and bad sources of information available to you online can impact what you are learning.
In this blog post, we will talk about a coincidence that you may not have noticed before, but may start to see after reading this, provide you with some fitness and related internet safety tips, and then discuss how copyright and technology has impacted our generation. Now please think about this question: have you ever been on a social media site like Facebook and noticed that there were ads about physical activity programs after you were looking for ways to get more fit on Google? This is not a weird coincidence. According to a Ted talk from Jennifer Golbeck, sites like Facebook are able to store information about things you have liked or searched for on their site and then send that information out to companies that can send targeted ads. This means the things you look at online can leave behind information that companies can use to learn more about your behavior or to send ads targeting the things you are interested in so they can potentially make more money. Although these targeted ads may not be the worst case scenario, please keep in mind in the future that what you look at online is available for others to see, so practicing caution would be best in order to actually avoid the worst case scenario. Now that you are more aware of this issue, let’s talk about some ways that you can protect yourself in terms of your body and the internet.
Fitness tip: when you are learning a new exercise, you should always make sure that you are doing the exercise correctly so you don’t hurt yourself and you should have an idea of what you are working out to guide you along.
Internet tip: similarly to the fitness tip, when you are looking at information, you should always check the original source and the legitimacy of the site you are looking at to make sure that you are getting accurate information.
Fitness tip: with exercising, everyone has different opinions on which exercise works best. As long as you believe the exercise is safe and effective for you, don’t feel the need to conform and follow what other people are doing.
Internet tip: like the last fitness tip, try to find sources that you believe are accurate and reliable. The sites you use may not always be the same as others, but as long as you have done your due diligence in checking the original source, who’s to say that your source is worse than someone else’s?
Copyright notice: this blog post is meant to provide general information about ways to become more physically active and not meant to make a profit. Within this post, I have lots of information that I did not research and find out on my own, but I do provide links to the original source. In this blog, I will never plagiarize anybody else’s work without providing credit and I believe that you can also share this blog to provide information to others as long as you do the same. This blog post is meant to spread knowledge and teach others about a topic that may be intimidating and daunting in a friendly and safe way.
The last major topic that I wanted to address in this post relates to Lawrence Lessig’s Tedtalk. In his talk, a major point that he emphasized was how technology today has taken away our ability to figure things out. This is important because if this continues, our problem solving skills will eventually decline and we will have to rely on the internet to provide all our answers instead of being able to work through it ourselves. Now you may be wondering how this could possibly relate to physical activity. Say for example you hear about a new exercise from your friend and you want to go to the gym to try it out. These days, because information is so readily available, you won’t be able to work through potential issues, and build your way up to performing the exercise. Instead, you should try to practice the exercise yourself and use the information online as a guide to help you learn and master it.
Also, if reading is not the way you learn, I have other sources of information that you can always use. If you prefer a visual source, watch some of my videos at vimeo. I will also link my Instagram and Facebook. These platforms provide similar information to the blog with a focus on getting you to become more physically fit.
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