Push the Play Button to listen to Episode 13 of The Web Radio Today Podcast

Skip Orem hosts EPISODE 13 of the Web Radio Today Podcast

Recorded at Skip’s Voice Over Studio Nolensville, TN

Bible Verses Cited (Matthew 29:26, Isaiah 41:10, Matthew 11:28

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

(time stamps do not include music run times

Skip Orem (00:00):

It is a hot summer morning here in the Nashville, Tennessee area. And hey everybody, I’m Skip Orem welcoming you to the July 24th, 2020 edition of Web Radio Today, this is episode number 13, and I am recording the podcast today on my back porch here in Nolensville, Tennessee. I hope you’ll excuse any background noises, any airplanes flying by, any birds singing, cars going by, hopefully no lawn mowers or, or grass blowers. I wanted to come outside and do the show this morning just to get out of the studio for a little while, get some fresh air. It’s cool and comfortable right now out here this morning, but it’s going to be a scorcher a little later on today here in the middle Tennessee area. I hope that it’s a nice day wherever you are listening from today, because on today’s episode, we’re going to be talking briefly about heart rate monitors, which can help you tracking your different training zones when you’re doing heart rate training as part of your exercise program.

Skip Orem (01:12):

And then we’ll begin to discuss the importance of making sure that you’ve included strength training as part of your exercise program. And of course this episode will contain a mini workout and a pretty cool featured song a little later in what should come in at about a 30 minute podcast. I know that our listeners are living a very full and active life and that you probably have a lot of stuff you need to do so I don’t want this podcast to take up too much of your valuable time today. You know that phrase in the blink of an eye? I think that perhaps there are some life lessons in that phrase in the blink of an eye. And I want to see if you agree with me about that. So we’ll talk a little later about the phrase in the blink of an eye. I had a situation that came up last week, that brought it home to me that a lot of us are trying to deal with things that just seem so out of our control.

Skip Orem (02:30):

Personally, I consider it a gift from God that I don’t have this need to control. Well, this need to control everything. I like to be in control in certain situations and when a situation needs to be controlled and nobody’s taken control, I’d be the first to jump in and try to run things. But for the most part, I’m not what you’d call a control freak. There are people out there, maybe you’re one of them who just feel the need to control everything. Here’s the thing though, whether you’re like me or whether you feel that need to control everything, well, the thing is, there are just so many situations that are totally out of our control. Well, you can drive yourself nuts, trying to figure out how to get some of these situations under control. And then there are those times when someone we know or someone close to us is going through a rough time, maybe an illness.

Skip Orem (03:37):

And we just want to help them in any way that we can, but we don’t know what to do, or maybe we don’t have the means to go to them and help them. And then of course, most of us, we worry about tomorrow. We worry about the future and we don’t really have any control over that, but we sure try to control it. All of this worry, all of this need to control things that we can’t control, this need to do something or help when we don’t know how to help, or we don’t have the means to help, this constant worry about tomorrow. It’s not good for us. It’s certainly not good for our health. It’s not good in helping us try to fight off diseases, because if we’re trying to stay healthy and prevent disease, eradicate a disease that might be inside of us, we need to do all that we can to lower our stress level. How do we do that?

Skip Orem (04:47):

Well, we need to look to God. Jesus, he says in Matthew, 19:26, and I think this applies to this worry and control stuff. Jesus looked at them and said, “With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.” So take heart everybody. Isaiah 41:10 “Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous hand.” That is strength right there to help you with your worries because we don’t have the strength to live each day, handle all these worries on our own. We certainly don’t have the strength to plan out and control every aspect of our lives, of our children’s lives, of everybody else’s lives. When we give that power to God, then we’re able to find relief. Matthew 11:28, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I’ll give you rest.

Skip Orem (06:12):

Wow, what are we like less than 10 minutes into the podcast today and already out here on the porch, middle Tennessee, the temperature’s gone up about 10 more degrees and the sky is getting even a little cloudier right now. So I don’t know if we’ll be finishing this entire podcast on the porch today, but I’m sure going to try. So before it gets even hotter, I think we better do a Web Radio Today Mini Workout. This is where you and I, we get up and move and in any way that we can, our goal is to get our heart rates up just a little, burn a couple of calories maybe, and gain some energy, actually gain some energy by expending some energy. If you can’t get up, move in any way that you safely can while you’re sitting down. The object here is movement, get your heart beating a little faster. Walking, running, dancing, cycling, whatever you want to do.

Skip Orem (07:17):
If you’re doing a workout right now as you listen to the Web Radio Today Podcast, if you’re doing a

workout right now, crank it up during this mini workout. Start moving everybody.

Skip Orem (07:29):

Bring it down and cool down for just a couple of minutes before you stop. Keep moving, but at a much slower pace. I’ve received positive comments about our heart rate training mini workout, which we featured on last week’s episode. If you didn’t listen yet to that episode, and if you want to try that very simple mini sample interval training workout, go to WebRadioToday.com and then click on the audio bursts page and then click on the button for the mini workout and it’ll be right there for you to download. I’ll also link to it in the show notes page for this episode and show notes are webradiotoday.com, just click on the podcast and show notes page. Okay. Let’s bring the cool-down part of our mini workout for episode number 13 to an end right now.

Skip Orem (08:37):

On next week’s Web Radio Today episode, that’ll be episode 14. It’ll be out on Friday, July 31st, next Friday, that entire episode, all 25 minutes of it, will be a standalone heart rate training workout. And that’ll be designed for our listeners who are using the interval training heart rate training plan A. Now this is important. If you’re not familiar with heart rate training, I’d suggest that you listen to Web Radio Today episode number 12, that’s last week’s episode. It’ll give you a lot of good background information that’ll help you get started with heart rate training. That’s episode 12, last week’s episode of the Web Radio Today podcast. The combination of that mini workout. If you try that, that mini workout that was part of episode 12, and then the PDF that I wrote on heart rate training.

Skip Orem (09:39):

And by the way, that PDF that’ll also be in the show notes for this episode, with those two things, I think that we’ve given you a pretty good under understanding and introduction into heart rate training and the different heart rate training zones. And I’ve also tried to show you how by listening to your body, that you’ll sort of know which heart rate training zone you’re exercising in. But if you want to have a more specific and concise measurement of your heart rate, making sure that you’re correctly in each one of those training zones, one very simple way to do that is to stop and find your pulse on your wrist or on your neck. Measure your pulse, count your heart beats for 10 seconds, and then multiply that number by six. That’ll give you your heart rate right there at that second.

Skip Orem (10:37):

And if you know what heart rate training zone you should be in and you’ve counted your heart beats like that, you’ll be able to know if you are exercising at the correct heartbeat for that training zone. Of course, the problem there is that you have to stop your workout for a few seconds to take those measurements. The other way you can measure your heart rate is to wear a heart rate monitor. I do that by wearing my Apple Watch, which is constantly measuring my heartbeat as I do my workout. Well, that’s a little more expensive of a way to do all that, especially if you don’t currently own an iPhone or an Apple Watch. Another standalone, less expensive device is the Fitbit Charge 4 Advanced Fitness Tracker. You wear that device on your wrist and then it’ll track your heartbeat, it’ll display that, it’ll also track your workout and also then store the data.

Skip Orem (11:33):

Those are the two devices that I know enough about to recommend. Amazon has the Fitbit Charge 4 for about $130. And I’ll also link to that in the show notes. There are other devices out there, some may be a little more accurate than the Apple Watch or the Fitbit because with those devices, you’re actually wearing a band around your chest as you exercise, and then your heart rate then displays on a device on your wrist. And then of course you can still get deeper into the weeds with a ton of other devices to measure your heart rate. My recommendation, at least for now, especially if you’re just starting out with heart rate interval training, listen to your body and you’ll do just fine. And now it is time for the featured song for today’s episode. And then after we listen to the featured song, we’re going to move into the strength training part of our exercise element. And then still later in the podcast, we will look at what can happen in the blink of an eye.

Skip Orem (12:45):
Enjoy with me now, The Fire Apes, For a Day.

Skip Orem (12:52):

The Fire Apes, a little bit of a Beatles sound on Web Radio Today. Regular listeners know that the Web Radio Today fitness model has seven elements: faith, diet, exercise, attitude, positive imagery, music, and knowledge. And the past few weeks we’ve been talking about the exercise elements, specifically heart rate training. I want to spend a little time today talking about the other part of the exercise element, strength training. My neighbor’s dogs are now deciding that they want to be part of the podcast. I don’t need to tell our listeners that the human body changes as we get older. And sometimes, well, we don’t particularly like those changes. Our metabolism, it gets slower, our strength, and in particular, our muscle mass begins to decrease.

Skip Orem (13:47):

We lose quite a bit of our bone density and our body fat increases. We get stiffer joints. Wow. By the time we reach our seventies, the average person loses about 25% of their muscle mass. Those changes, sad as they are, they’re normal, and we definitely are all going to experience them in our sixties and our seventies, but they don’t need to be extreme. And we can do some things to slow and minimize those changes. We’re already working to keep our heart healthy by doing heart rate training. However, we also need to strengthen our muscles, our other muscles, our bones. We need to keep our joints in shape. And we could do that by doing strength training. Most of the changes due to aging, they’re simply a result of not using our muscles and inactivity.

Skip Orem (14:47):

My prescription for correcting all that or at trying to minimize a lot of it: strength training. Doing strength training as part of your exercise, your overall exercise plan, it allows us to build muscles, build up those muscles that are going away and those stronger muscles, those built up muscles, well, what they do is they burn off fat. Strength training gives us a lot more mobility and it helps us to never have to need those canes and those walkers. As we improve our bodies with strength training, everything improves, and it helps us to make these senior years easier, to have more fun. It helps us to fight off diseases. If you want to do that, here’s your homework. I’m going to post two articles in the show notes for this episode at webradiotoday.com. The first article, Strength Training: Get Stronger, Leaner and Healthier, it’s an article written by the Mayo Clinic staff. And then the second article is Everything You Need to Know About Strength Training. That article comes from Silver Sneakers.

Skip Orem (16:06):

Remember, I will post links to those two articles in the show notes for this episode at webradiotoday.com. In the next two weeks, plan to read those two articles and begin to think about how you can add strength training into your exercise routine. And then on Web Radio Today episode 15, that’s two weeks from today, on that episode, we’ll introduce you to the Web Radio Today strength training program, designed specifically for folks in their sixties and their seventies. Don’t forget though, next week’s episode will be a special workout episode. That workout, the plan A heart rate training interval training workout coached by me. Plus we’ll have some good music on that episode to work out with. Just a reminder all of our episodes, all of the episodes of Web Radio Today are available wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on every major podcasting platform and in addition all of the Web Radio Today episodes are also right there a the webradiotoday.com website.

Skip Orem (17:22):

I’m undercover on the porch out here, but the rain has started to come down, but it’s not going to stop me. It’s not going to stop us everybody. Episode 13 of Web Radio Today continues on. I read just an amazing article today. I was turned on to the article by listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Spielman and Hooley We Tackle Life podcast. They talk a lot about Ohio State sports. They also talk a lot about faith and this article that Chris Spielman was reading from and alluded to, and that I subsequently read later, talks a lot about this COVID-19 stuff and what we’re going through right now as a nation from a faith perspective. I have recorded me reading this article and I’ve posted it at webradiotoday.com. It will be in the show notes for this episode, and it’ll also be on the audio burst page there at Web Radio Today.com.

Skip Orem (18:23):

I don’t want to get into all of this COVID stuff on our podcast, but I think if you want some more information about it, if you want to think about it from a faith perspective, that article is kind of cool. You have two choices. You can push the play button there and you can listen to me read the article, or you can read the transcript of the article that’s also there as part of the link on WebRadioToday.com. Quite a bit of background ambience on the Web Radio Today podcast today, we started out with dogs barking, now we have rain coming down and I think at some point we might even get a little bit of thunder in the background, but it’s all good. And I think it especially adds some background to what we’re going to talk about next.

Skip Orem (19:12):

When I was getting ready to be wheeled into the operating room for my prostate surgery in March, just before I was due to roll out of that preop room and head for the operating room, the senior deacon at my church, he showed up. It was kind of funny because in addition to being a deacon at my church, his job was that he was a nurse at Vanderbilt Hospital, a member of their heart transplant team. So he shows up there into the preop room with his special heart transplant team scrubs on, heart transplant team written right there on his shirt. I thought, wait a minute, I’m not getting a heart transplant.

Skip Orem (19:59):

Actually, he was there to pray with my wife, Terry and I just before the surgery, I appreciated that so much. It meant just so much to me. And I remember that he was saying to Terry, just after we finished our prayer, he was saying to her that she needed to go downstairs to the family waiting room and wait there for about six hours or more while my surgery was taking place. But for me, that time would go by just in the blink of an eye, the blink of an eye. I’ve been thinking and actually praying, talking with God about what that phrase means to me, in the blink of an eye. As it’s now thundering in the background, that phrase, it helps me to understand how really fragile and short our life on earth here is compared to spending eternity with Jesus. That’s what our life here on earth is according to God’s total plan for us, our time here on Earth, it’s just like the blink of an eye.

Skip Orem (21:17):

All that goes on in our lives here on Earth, the beginning to the end and all those things that we experience in between, it’s just the blink of an eye, such a short time compared to eternity. Here’s one way you can live that short time that we have on Earth. Get the most you can out of this life, live for today because tomorrow we die. Acquire possessions, have fun. Live the good life. There is a problem with that kind of thinking because we don’t just die, there is an afterlife and where we spend that afterlife, which has all of eternity, where we spend eternity, depends on how we live our lives today. Is Jesus at the center of your life? Because he needs to be. Living a life centered on Jesus, it begins with realizing that well, God is the author of our story.

Skip Orem (22:25):

Everything that we have was given to us by God. Our blessings, our talents, all the good things, all the bad things. Everything comes from God. Believing in Jesus and then believing in his life, his death, his resurrection, that’s more than just a ticket to heaven, although it is, but this is important. Our Christ- centered life gives us hope and joy that we can experience in the here and now in this life because Jesus, he’s promised us his presence in our life here on Earth until he calls us home. It isn’t wrong, everybody to pursue our personal goals here on Earth, but Jesus, he needs to be our anchor, our guide, our true compass on how we live our life on Earth. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you: come on home to

Jesus, make him the center of your life. You’ll see an immediate change in everything and that gift, it’s out there for the taking, accept it and walk with Jesus.

Skip Orem (23:47):

It’s so simple. You don’t need to plan to let Jesus into your life. You don’t need to tie up any loose ends. You don’t need to be real good for a few days. You can come to Jesus right now, just as you are. Like the verse of the old hymn says, “Just as I am though tossed about, with many a conflict and many a doubt, fighting fears within and without. Oh, lamb of God. I come, I come.” Won’t you come home to Jesus today? He’s waiting for you just as you are, whatever bad things you may have done. He knows about them already. He doesn’t care. He wants to forgive you. Now Satan, he’s suggesting that, well, you might want to think about this for a little while before jumping into this Jesus thing.

Skip Orem (24:50):

Satan, he’s telling you don’t make any rash decisions, you have all the time in the world. That’s a lie. No you don’t. Tomorrow’s not guaranteed. It could all be gone in the blink of an eye. If you haven’t done so already, accept Jesus today. Let him walk with you and guide you through this life. He’ll bring you joy in this life, and then he’s going to welcome you home in the next life. Walk into any church and the first person that you see, tell them you want to accept Jesus now, today. You’ll put a smile on their face and they will welcome you home.