Choosing To Stay Active

By Samuel Almazan Senior Staff Writer

It’s the Spring Semester, which means excellent and beautiful weather is among us, right? Well, here in Connecticut, and everywhere else in New England, the “spring semester” doesn’t start feeling like spring till the end of the semester.

We start the semester wearing our winter coats, hats, and scarfs. It’s too cold to be outside, which limits our options on activities we can do during the winter time.

As a result, being active can seem hard to do. It’s too cold. Going outside isn’t an option until later in the semester. However, it’s best to remain active during the winter. At HCC, they have a Fitness Center, which is available to all students, staff, and faculty members. Being active, like going to the gym, can be very beneficial for your health and mental state.

With the HCC gym available to students, students have easy options to stay healthy and being able to work on themselves.

“If you’re stressed, come to the gym at HCC to relieve that stress you might have,” said Joshua Gee, a student worker there.

“We are looking to start classes such as Yoga, Kickboxing, etc…” added Jessica Maldonado, a student worker who is heavily involved with the fitness center.

A college semester might be stressing you out, and being active, like going to the gym or doing yoga, can help you let go of the stress.

I understand that school can take a lot of your time. Not only school, but work is another factor that an cause us some stress and take away our free time.

At the end of the day, though, it’s up to us to choose to stay active. And with this, you choose to be healthy and work on your mental state.

For me, when I go to the gym, it helps relieve all the stress that I have. Especially during the semester, I feel like I can’t breathe at times. I have to find something to get my mind off of things, and what’s better than going to the gym where I can forget about the stress and also work on myself?

“During the beginning of the new year, we see an increase of college students joining the club,” said Phillip Pim, the general manager of L.A. Fitness. “We see an increase due to the fact that students want to remain active during the cold months and the nice weather is around the corner.”

And we may start the spring semester in the cold months of winter but, once the semester is about to finish, we now have the nice weather among us. During the middle of the semester, we have spring break available to us. With all that being said, choosing to remain active will have you ready to look your best. Either for spring break or the upcoming summer, you’ll be ready. All that is available to us, if we choose to remain active.

So, when the spring semester starts, and you’re thinking of ways to stay active, and looking for ways to improve your mental health and overall health, adding a fitness routine will be beneficial to you. You can also add a nutritional diet to this new routine, which will help you stay healthy. Now with a consistent workout routine, you can now improve your mental health, and your body will be ready for spring break and the summer.

If you like the idea of joining a club to workout at, you can go to the HCC Fitness center, located at Beacon Hall room 117 or you can join L.A. Fitness, where they offer a student discount. All you have to do is present your student I.D. to receive that discount.