Above: Bryn shows off two 10 pointers she got on the first time shooting at a distance of 100 feet.
On a somewhat cold and windy day in December.
"Charles is a great teacher! I have been taking classes with him since the summer, starting out as an absolute beginner. With Charles’ guidance I have progressed quickly, and now I shoot with confidence and accuracy. Charles is very knowledgeable about archery and intertwines lessons about theory and equipment into the practical, hands-on sessions. He has a good eye for trouble areas, and helps you quickly correct mistakes you’re making. Taking lessons with Charles has been a great experience and I can’t wait to return again in the spring!" - Bryn J.
Note
I typically start students off shooting at relatively short distances of 30 to 60 feet (10 to 20 yards) and then as they get better I start giving them longer distance challenges. In the above testimonial it was Bryn's first time shooting at a distance of roughly 100 feet. The first couple rounds was really more about figuring out where to aim, but after she figured out where to aim the quality of her clusters tightened up and she was scoring lots of yellows and reds.
Long range accuracy is challenging, but by practicing attention to detail with respect to form and learning how to adjust for wind conditions it is possible to get better and better. Earlier this year one of my students "Robin Hooded" and broke one of my arrows at a distance of 60 yards (180 feet).
"Thanks again for the archery lessons you gave our son during the Summer. You were a really great instructor.
We will be getting him his own equipment for Christmas. Can you recommend what equipment we should get him for Christmas and where to go shopping?
Have a great Christmas! Maggie and Tobias H."
Samick Sage
Hey Maggie and Tobias!
You are welcome. Always happy to help.
Since your son is in his late teens I recommend getting him the following from Tent City in North York:
Samick Sage, 25 lbs, right hand pull.* $150.
12 arrows, preferably 600 spine. Beman Junior Hunters or Easton 600s would work. $7 to $10 per arrow depending on the manufacturer or whether you have custom fletched arrows.
Finger glove, size large. Approx. $14.
Arm bracer. Approx. $20 or more for a good one.
Bowstringer. Approx. $12.
Bow string wax. Approx. $10.
Spare bow string for future use. Approx. $15.
Arrow rest. $7 to to $36 for a decent one. Do NOT get the plastic sticker arrow rests.
Quiver. Optional, prices vary.
* There are other bows I could recommend for your son, but the Samick Sage is a very good starter recurve bow. Samick also has a good warranty. Other brands / models I recommend include the Samick Red Stag, Jandao, Bear Grizzly, Martin Jaguar/Saber/Panther. All of these brands have a good or very good warranty. I recommend avoiding any company that doesn't have a warranty.
I also recommend avoiding any counterfeit / knock-off bows. A growing problem in the industry is disreputable companies selling counterfeit archery equipment made overseas in China/etc. Not only is there no warranty, but they break easily.
Best of luck and happy shooting!
Follow up email:
"Thanks for the list! Your advice is invaluable. See you next year!"
Which for Toronto means we are usually in for 3-4 months of miserable cold weather. But it doesn't have to be miserable if you don't want it to be.
Winter should not be an excuse to not exercise either. After all, exercising keeps you warm.
We have all seen the crazy joggers out there in the harshest of weather, apparently unaffected by the extreme cold.
HOWEVER, jogging is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is actually on the topic of KEEPING WARM for survival purposes - or at very least comfort levels. It has been my experience that the simple act of "rubbing your hands together" really only works for your hands, and if you want to stay warm and comfortable sometimes it is necessary to do more full body exercises.
For example one of the things that I sometimes do is I miscalculate how cold it is outside and I don't wear enough clothing. Thus I end up freezing my proverbial behind off, but I do have a trick to prevent it...
I do 100 jumping jacks. Takes about 2 minutes to do, but 100 jumping jacks later and I am cozy warm because my blood is now pumping energy from my fat stores and invigorating my body. Burning the fat off in such an aggressive manner warms the muscles, warms the blood, and ultimately warms the whole body.
Jumping jacks are not the only exercise you can use to keep warm however...
Five Ways to Keep Warm using Exercises
#1. Weightlifting
You don't need the ghetto weightlifting set like the guy below, any weights will do. Backpack, suitcase, whatever you have handy.
#2. Body Weight Exercises or Calisthenics
Pushups, chin-ups, wall push-ups, situps, it doesn't matter. Any old school body weight exercise will do. Even the simple act of climbing something, such as stairs, can keep your body warm. If you are athletic enough you could even do hand-stand push-ups.
The trick with some of these exercises, eg. chin-ups, is that you need something stable that isn't going to break under your body weight. Pick something big and stable.
The young woman on the right for example chose the underside of a bridge to exercise on, but the basic concept is there. Something large, heavy, durable, won't tip over / rock back and forth. It also shouldn't have sharp edges, spikes or anything dangerous like that in the vicinity.
The video below shows a young woman demonstrating a number of different body weight exercises outdoors.
#3. Yoga
You don't even need a mat to do winter yoga, the snow is your nice soft mat. But in the event you are surrounding by cold harsh ice, a blanket would also do. Helps if you are already familiar with yoga, but if you are not please read my posts on the topic or check out the thousands of free videos on YouTube.
#4. Squats or Squat Jumps
Squats are not hard. You just squat down part way, keep your back aligned straight up and down, and then stand back up again. Do 20 of those and your legs will be warmed up significantly.
For extra challenge, do the squats while carrying a weight (perhaps a backpack full of books), or try squat jumps - wherein you squat down and then stand up so fast that you jump into the air.
#5. Stretching and Scratching
Sometimes the simple act of stretching, touching your toes, flexing various muscles, can also warm you up. It doesn't take much, and it is far less obvious what you are doing if you have a crowd of people staring at you. If you are standing on a cold train platform with lots of people around, they may get weirded out by someone who suddenly decides to do 100 jumping jacks - but someone who is just stretching won't get a second glance.
The second part is this last tip is that you can also warm your skin by scratching it. Scratch your back, your arms, your chest, your legs - it might look you have a rash to a passerby, or it might look like you just have an itchy arm and that is no big deal.
If it truly is a survival situation then embarrassment isn't a factor any more.
If you are familiar with my "The Pet Project" then you know that "Our Cat is Fat" and that "Kitty is on a new Diet". It is all part of my Pet Project to get our cat Victoria to lose weight, because she put on a few extra pounds while she was trapped in a cage at the pet store.
Part of Victoria's new diet and exercise regime is that I play with her every day, often two or three times per day, trying to get her running, jumping and exercising like normal outdoor cats would be. Having her chase feathers on a string for endless hours does get boring eventually so I embarked on a quest to get Victoria into "cat walking".
On Saturday it took two people just to get the collar on her, along with her identification tags which she really should keep on her anyway. It took one person feeding her kitty treats and another person trying to put the collar on her without getting bitten to get the job done.
I have also tried getting a harness on her, which is specifically made for cat walking, but she wouldn't have that and instead would attack the harness, thinking it was a new toy to play / bite / claw. I am still hoping to get her into a harness someday, but it may take more effort.
Earlier today (less than 30 minutes ago, really) I managed to get the leash on her collar. Her response was to attack the leash. 10 minutes of biting and attacking the leash later, and kitty treats no longer doing their job to coax her, I managed to get her into our foyer hallway using the ol' feathers on a string trick.
Once in the foyer I closed the door, and then opened the door into the apartment building hallway - a place which she has never been before, except for the day she came home with us in a box from the pet store.
Victoria walked up to the doorway, to the threshold and looked around, she then backed away frightened. Moments later she walked back out there again and stuck her head into the hallway, heard a noise coming from outside, freaked out and ran back inside the foyer and started pushing at the foyer door, trying to climb the foyer door, and managed to open the door by headbutting it (she routinely pushes the bedroom door open with her head so she can wake us up in the morning). Once inside the apartment she scampered, reaching the end of her leash, which I dropped because it was self-evident that she didn't want to explore the apartment building hallway.
The world beyond our apartment is big and scary apparently, to the mind of a timid housecat. She spends endless hours sitting at various window sills watching the world outside, but the moment she gets a chance to go outside and explore a little bit she gets scared, freaks out and runs back to the safety of her home.
Oh to have a smart cat - a really smart cat, who understands what the leash is for. And that the world beyond our home isn't so scary.
The cat in the above photo clearly knows what a leash is for.
In related news:
Weighed Victoria again today, she is currently 12.0 lbs, a more reasonable weight. Exercise and new diet is clearly working. She had "Fancy Feast" on Sunday, which she really enjoyed, but otherwise it is the new Whiskas cat food that I mentioned in Part Two of the "The Pet Project".
I have only ever gone to gyms in Toronto so I don't know if they differ around the world, but I assume that what passes for "gym music" at Toronto gyms is probably pretty homogenous across most of Canada and the USA.
Which is to say it is "upbeat dance music", which in Toronto means you would normally hear this kind of music at a dance club downtown and not anywhere else - except for apparently, Toronto gyms.
Listening to the same dance music over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over can get pretty annoying however.
Gyms however simply don't care about the quality of their music, their primary goal is to make your credit card bill bigger by overbilling you multiple times per month, charging for extra services, and charging you one extra month on the day you cancel your gym membership*.
* That actually happened to me with Extreme Fitness. I cancelled my credit card because I had heard they overcharge people for months and months after your membership was cancelled because they CAN and then claim that the person never cancelled their membership / claim it was a billing error / refuse to refund the monies owed to the customer. So after cancelling my card I called them up and cancelled my membership, and the woman on the phone tried to charge my credit card for an extra month while I was on the phone - and was very rude to me after she discovered I had cancelled my credit card and thwarted her attempt to deliberately overcharge me. Also I should note that according to CBC's Marketplace, Extreme Fitness is not the only company that routinely does these things. The whole gym industry does it, which is why the last time I got a gym membership it was for Ryerson University - which is non-profit and has no goal to overcharge people. I still paid with cash however, so word to the wise - if you get a gym membership in Toronto, always pay with cash.
Anyway, back to my primary topic - gym music.
Because gym music is so appalling many people end up bringing their smart phone or mp3 player and listening to their own music instead. Which begs the question, if the music is so bad and people are listening to their own, why not just get rid of the music and replace it with relative peace and quiet? Would it be because then we would have to listen to people grunting on the machines, chatting to each other, gulping down water, idiots dispensing health advice, the one vegan guy who is always trying to convince people to become vegans, etc...?
In which case maybe what gym goers really need is tranquil background noises, that aren't music at all. The sound of a thunderstorm for example. Or tranquil chirping of birds. Whatever. Just so its not the same upbeat dance music over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Because clearly that junk isn't helping anyone and everyone clearly prefers to listen to their own music anyway.
Everyone has different musical tastes. The percentage of people who actually enjoy listening to dance music all the time is probably a pretty small percentage of Toronto's diverse population.
Musical taste is often directly correlated between social status (meaning wealth) and socio-economic and ethnic background. At least according to a study published in 2015 in the Canadian Review of Sociology, and written by a professor from UBC. The study involved nearly 1,600 telephone interviews with adults in Vancouver and Toronto, who were asked about their likes and dislikes of 21 musical genres.
The study determined that poorer, less-educated people tended to like country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap. Meanwhile, their wealthier and often better-educated counterparts preferred genres such as classical, blues, jazz, opera, choral, pop, reggae, rock, world and musical theatre.
So a more specific genre like "dance pop", the kind of which is played in gyms really only appeals to one group of people - wealthy or well off young white people between the ages of 20 and 29. Which for a gym, really shows what their target audience is - young people with money.
And gym music targets women - specifically young white women with money, who are often single (but that doesn't mean you should talk to them!!!) and insecure about their bodies.
Men in contrast are less worried about their bodies. A man having a "little extra weight" is considered to be a cultural norm by society. Women with a beer gut however, that is considered to be outright scary.
There is also a solid argument that the culture of gym music is even racist, because it is so specifically geared towards white women who are insecure about their bodies, have money, and feel that they have to look attractive physically in order to attract a man (which should never happen at the gym by the way, because the man in question will likely be a horrible person who is only attracted to physical looks).
If you know of a gym in Toronto that DOES NOT play horrible dance pop music please post a comment about it in the comments below. With any luck it will be a boxing gym or something similar, as the sound of grunting and people hitting punching bags is normal there - music at such a location would be considered idiotic.
Also if you are one of those people who actually likes gym music I invite you to listen to the Flo Rida song "Right Round" 100 times or until you finally agree with me. (I heard that song roughly every 30 minutes whenever I was at Extreme Fitness. It is an abomination of an old 80s song.)
ADVICE
Bring your own music to the gym.
Better yet, skip the gym treadmill and go jogging outside.
Love your music, love yourself.
Try new genres of music sometimes. It won't hurt to broaden your horizons.
Try new exercises regularly. It doesn't hurt to try new things in general.
Try new sports that are outdoors. Extra fresh air never hurt you.
Personal Note - While writing this post I did a search of my mp3 collection for the word "love" and then made a playlist of songs with love in the title. The first song on the list is 10cc's "I'm not in love". YouTube video below if you are curious.
Looking to sign up for archery lessons, boxing lessons, swimming lessons, ice skating lessons or personal training sessions? Start by emailing cardiotrek@gmail.com and lets talk fitness!
