Feeling the burn while in the comfort of your home

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to the gym. With such a busy school schedule it gets hard to make that trip. I plan to go an hour and I end up spending 2 hours by the time I get there and back and cleaned-up. So instead of going to the gym, I’ve decided to work out at home with Beachbody’s P90X extreme home fitness program. This work out is a butt-kicker. It works using muscle confusion to ensure your body pushes past a plateau in your workouts and moves beyod boring workouts. That means when you’ve worked out the chest you then go ahead and work on your back. The program includes 13 DVDs to work out the butt, the back, chest, arms, cardio, abs and flexibility in all sorts of different ways while pushing your body to its limits. The DVDs focus mainly on using your own body weight as resistance to build strength, power and endurance, and every once in a while throws in dumbbells for a little something extra.

Now these workouts are tough. The toughest I’ve ever done. I’ll admit I’ve never had the guts to push my body to the extent P90X does, but now I’m willing to try. I’ve just finished my first week of the program and I was sore every day. But I pressed on even if I couldn’t finish all the different moves or had to modify some of the exercises so I could actually do them. 6 days a week this program works you out hard. In the first week I kinda dreaded doing the workouts, but after I finished I felt awesome and glad I got through it.

The creator behind P90X is Tony Horton. He’s a great guy to have around when I really want to quit. He keeps me motivated by yelling through my TV: telling me to keep going, add more resistance or that I’m half way there. Before P90X I would go to the gym to do my thing and get out. I never had anyone but myself to get motivated and work hard, and now that I think about it I may have just half-assed it.

So I know I just started, but so far I love using this program. I get my hour work out done and then can get right into all the school work I need to do - this is the best thing about it. P90X may not be the workout for you, but I think the important part is to make time anyway you can to get some exercise into your life. Home workouts are a great idea, because they give you freedom and flexibility to workout any time you want. There is lots of great workout DVDs out there to help you burn calories and build strength at home, so give one of them a try. It can be cheaper than joining the gym, and if you don’t like one just switch to another with no cancellation fees.

Facebook and Twitter, what's the difference?

This week, Melanie asked the pr class to blog about the differences between Facebook and Twitter beyond the 140 character limit. While both are very helpful to get messages across to friends and target audiences the way both go about it are through very different ways.

First of all, after I speaking with my friends I found out that a lot of them use Facebook and not Twitter. Personally, I have both Twitter and Facebook pages, but I haven't used my Twitter page since before Christmas break. I think this speaks to the fact that Facebook is where people go to form online communities and share aspects of their lives, whereas Twitter is about sharing info that is dynamic. I say this not only from my experiences with both, but through other people I've talked to about their use of both sites share. A lot of people use Twitter as a way to get their news. Others, like what Melanie preaches to us, use Twitter as a means to see what people in their profession are doing and as a way to be on the up and up.

Facebook, on the other hand, is about connecting with old friends and making new friends. It's also a way to keep an online album of yourself so that people you haven't seen in awhile can see what you've been up to a vice-verca.

While both are similar in that they allow for their users to share information, they can be used to form different relationships. Twitter is a get your message out type of tool, whereas Facebook is about building lasting relationships.

Radio dramas anyone?

Have you heard of this thing called the radio drama? Up until I became a CreComm student I had never heard a radio drama. I didn’t even know they still existed after being usurped by TV. But apparently they do, and since we’re devoting a good chunk of creative writing class time to the creation of one people must still care. But who listens to these things? I haven’t heard of anyone in their 20s ever say anything about them, or for that matter their 30s, 40s, or 50s. But maybe it’s because I never asked.

Having never heard a radio drama, oh I don’t know, before last week, I’m surprised we learn about it at school because I don’t feel it’s something people in my generation, I’m almost 25 by the way, can connect with. Most of us don’t listen to the radio and when we do it’s in the car flipping through stations desperately looking for one that isn’t in the middle of a 15-minute commercial break. But I think radio dramas might have gotten too quick a shove out the door.

I think a radio drama would be a lot like reading a book, but some one else is the one that’s doing all the work. The medium of radio is a visual one, and dramas create those visual through voices and sound FXs. In the 21^st century we have what I think is a new version of the radio drama, we have audio books that re-create the characters in the story and the feel of the story. But I don’t think enough people take advantage of these audio books, because like the decline of radio people are more interested in seeing the visual instead of imagining it for themselves, and with the internet quickly becoming the centre of how most people communicate and watch TV the auditory mediums are something, I fear, that will be lost from our society.