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Ed Tech Fitness Challenge of the Week – Bird Dog

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What a difference a week makes! At this time last week everyone in Maine was grumbling about the possibility of more snow. Today, we’re grumbling about humidity and thunderstorms in the forecast. Over the weekend it was nice enough to get outside to play. I got in a 62 mile bike ride on Saturday as part of my training for a 200 miler at the end of June. How was your weekend?

The top of Evans Notch in the White Mountain National Forest. Beautiful place for a bike ride.

Challenge of the Week!

This week’s challenge is a fun one! This week we’re doing a core strengthening exercise called bird dogs. This exercise looks kind of funny and it is actually fun to do. When done properly, bird dogs will improve your balance and core strength.

You do this exercise starting on your hands and knees then lift your right arm and left leg, then switch. Watch the following video starting at the 5:09 mark to see a demonstration.

Calendar of Ed Tech Fitness Challenges

The calendar of May’s previous challenges and the upcoming challenges is available right here.

Good luck this week!

Requisite disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or personal trainer. Please consult your physician or personal trainer if you have any questions about your ability to complete these exercises.

Ed Tech Fitness Challenge of the Week – Half Kneel Chops

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Hello from Maine where over the weekend we had beautiful weather for playing outside. It is supposed to snow here tonight so it was good to get outside for exercise while we could. I hope that wherever you are, you got to play outside too.

Challenge of the Week

If you’re following along on the Ed Tech Fitness Challenge calendar, you probably noticed that this week’s challenge is to complete balanced sets of half-kneel chops. This might be a new exercise for you. In fact, it’s a relatively new exercise to me as it was just introduced to me in March.

Half-kneel chops can be completed with a dumbbell, a medicine ball, at a pull-down cable machine, or without any weight at all. The purpose of the exercise is to stretch and strengthen your core. This is an exercise that you don’t want to do unless you have sufficiently stretched and warmed up. You can see a GIF of the exercise here or watch the short videos here or here for demonstrations of how to do half-kneel chops.

Good luck! Have a great week!

Requisite disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or personal trainer. Please consult your physician or personal trainer if you have any questions about your ability to complete these exercises.

Strava – Improve Your Fitness by Challenging Yourself and Encouraging Your Friends

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Strava is a free app and social network for runners and cyclists. I have used it for the last five years to challenge myself and to encourage my friends on the way to reaching their cycling and running goals. This post is intended to summarize how Strava works and what you can do with it.

What is Strava?

At its core Strava is a free app that you can use on your phone (Android or iOS) and some smartwatches to track the distance and time of your ride or run. To do this you must enable location services on your phone then tap the “record” button in the app at the start of your ride or run. When you’re done, tap the button again to end the recording. Strava will save the route, speed, and time of your run or ride.

The Strava app can connect to other devices and apps to provide you with more data about your runs and rides. For example, I have Strava connected to the Wahoo ELEMNT computer on my bike. The Wahoo ELEMNT is what I use to view and track my cadence, speed, ride time, directions, heart rate, and watts. I also have my Garmin Instinct watch synced to Strava for tracking data when I go for a run.

Strava as a Social Network

Strava is more than just an app for tracking data about your exercise. There is a huge social network component to Strava.

On Strava you can follow your friends and give them “kudos” for a completing a run or ride. You have the option to make your account public for anyone to follow or you can make it private and manually approve or deny new followers. And just like other social networks you can follow people who aren’t your real-life friends. You can follow famous cyclists and runners who use Strava and make their data public.

Another social aspect of Strava is found in the King of the Mountain and Queen of the Mountain competitions. If you are the person to complete a segment the fastest, you will get a King of the Mountain or Queen of the Mountain badge. And if you don’t get it, you can still see how you stack up against other people who have ridden or run that same segment. I find those KOM segments to be a good way to motivate myself to put in a hard effort and see how much I can improve during the course of the outdoor riding season here in Maine.

Challenges and Badges

Throughout the year Strava hosts challenge activities that anyone can join from anywhere in the world. The challenges that I’m doing in May are to run 20 miles (cumulatively) and ride 100km (in one day). When you complete one of these challenges you get a badge. Some challenges come with the opportunity to win randomly-drawn prizes and some come with the opportunity to buy limited edition gear.

How to Join Strava

Joining Strava is easy. Simply install the app on your Android phone or on your iPhone then sign-up for an account. You can sign-up with a Google account, a Facebook account, or by using your email address and picking a password.

There is a premium version of Strava, but I’ve never used it so I can’t speak to whether or not the cost is worth it.

One final note, Strava can be used to track other fitness activities, but it is primarily designed for running and cycling which is why I focused on those activities in this post.

Time-saving Tips for Google Forms Users

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Google Forms provides a great platform for creating online quizzes, surveys, and progress trackers. Automatic grading of quiz questions is a great time-saver. Automated responses provide students with feedback in a timely manner. And self-updating progress trackers let you quickly see how your students are doing. But there are even more things that you can do to save time when using Google Forms. Here a few more things you can do to save time when using Google Forms.

Default Points and Default Requirement

Simply opening the preferences menu in Google Forms will lead you to a handful of time-saving options. Amongst those is the option to set a default point value for every question and the option to make every question required by default. By enabling those options you’ll never have to go back and edit a quiz because you forgot to score an item or make an item required.

Quickly Re-use a Form

Want to use the same Google Form for multiple groups? You have two options. You can make a copy of the original Form. When you make a copy the previous responses are not copied over. The downside to that option is that the new Form will have a different URL than the original. If you want to keep using the same URL, you can simply clear all responses to your Form. Before you clear all responses, download a CSV of the responses. Watch the following video for an explanation of both of these time-saving Google Forms options.

Make a QR Code for Your Google Form

If you want to get everyone to a Form quickly, having them scan a QR code is a good way to do that. In the following video I demonstrate my favorite method for making a QR code for a Google Form.

Ed Tech Fitness Challenge of the Week – Planks Three Ways

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Greetings from sunny Paris, Maine where it finally feels like spring. Over the weekend I was able to get in my first real, hard outdoor effort on my road bike. But perhaps the bigger accomplishment was raking leaves for hours without any soreness afterwards. I have to attribute that to doing a lot of stretching as part of last week’s Ed Tech Fitness challenge. How was your weekend? What did you do for fun and exercise? Leave a comment and let me know.

Challenge of the Week

Those of you who made a copy of the calendar of May challenges may have already noticed that this week’s challenge is to do planks three ways every day. Planking is a fantastic way to strengthen your core muscles. I can’t say that they are my favorite exercise, but they are effective. To break up the monotony of doing planks, I alternate between doing them on both elbows and then on just one elbow. For an extra challenge, try alternating between all three positions before breaking.

Planking 101

Here’s a good demonstration of how to do planks in three ways. The video was produced by UW Medicine. I like it because it doesn’t have any of the filler of many demonstration videos made by personal trainers who are trying to promote a service nor does it feature the typical “look at my mid-riff” models.

Good luck! Have a great week!

Requisite disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or personal trainer. Please consult your physician or personal trainer if you have any questions about your ability to complete planking exercises.

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