cam s podcast

Cameron interviews Emily about the impact of exercise on mental well-being, specifically in swimming. Emily says that exercise helps improve her mood and relieve stress. She mentions that being in the pool helps her focus on swimming and takes her mind off other aspects of life. Emily also talks about how her mental well-being can affect her performance in swimming. She mentions that going into practice with a bad mood can bring her practice down. Emily shares that swimmers do 20 hours of physical activity per week during the season and only 8 hours during the off-season. She mentions that changing things up during the off-season is beneficial. Hi, my name is Cameron Snowden. I am part of the UNCW Swimming and Dive team, and today I will be interviewing Emily Wade, who is also on the Swim and Dive team for UNCW, about my topic. So recently I did a research project on the impact of exercise on cognitive function. I recently did a research project on the impact of exercise on cognitive function, and to further my knowledge on this topic, I'm going to ask my friend Emily how exercise has been relevant in her life and how it improves her mental well-being, whether it's in life in general or in her sport. This appeals to the thinking, moving, and feeling dimensions of the 12 dimensions of wellness. So, hey Emily. Hey Cameron. How does your sport, swimming, or any kind of physical activity that takes place in your life affect you and your mental well-being? So being a swimmer on the swim team here at UNCW, I will say I've been swimming like basically my whole life, and there's just some days where I'm really stressed and not in a good mood, and maybe I don't want to practice that day, but I would say most of the time like going to practice and exercising like kind of helps me and puts me in a better mood, and I also think it like relieves some stress sometimes, like with school, and especially with swimming, I think it gets your mind off of like other outside aspects of your life, like school or like social life, just like being in the pool, and I think that works with a lot of other sports as well, not just swimming. Yeah, definitely. Follow-up question. How do you control maybe the stress and the other factors of your life when it comes to swimming? So kind of reversing it, how does swimming impact your mental well-being, or how does your mental well-being impact swimming? Yeah, so along with being a swimmer, swimming is also super stressful at some points, like during competition and when we're in season here, but I would say my mental like well-being sometimes impacts practice and swimming, like being in a bad mood could definitely bring your practice down. It just depends on how you go into practice and you know going into your workout, and again I feel like it goes not just with swimming, but maybe people who aren't athletes, just going and working out on your own can be really helpful. Definitely. Well, how much physical activity do you do on a daily or weekly basis, whichever you want to share? Yeah, so being a swimmer, we do by like the NCAA rules, we do 20 hours a week when we're in season, and now we're in off-season, so we do only eight, which feels like a lot less, so it's really nice, and we focus on other stuff in the off-season instead of just swimming, like we really don't swim not like nearly as much as we do in season when we're getting ready for conference. Yeah, so it definitely helps to make it to change stuff up when we're not in season, because in season it's just go, go, go the whole time basically, and in off-season it's a little bit more chill. Yeah, definitely. All right, well thank you for talking with me today, and I hope you have a good day, and we'll see you soon.