Intro

My name is Matthew Hoke and I am a senior at Los Altos High school. I am eighteen years old and I would like to pursue marketing in the future. I want to make my own skateboard brand or shop. I have been skating for many years and as you can guess it took a huge toll on my body. This is one of the reasons I wanted to start going to the gym, to fix my body. Weight lifting became a huge part of my life and I still go five days a week. Going to the gym has really helped with my mental health as well as my body’s recovery time. This is exactly why I wanted to talk about weightlifting, it has shaped my body and who I am today.

My name is Vinh Le, a senior at Lost Altos high, and a student at freestyle academy. I’m 18 years old and my motive in the future is to become a professional filmmaker, I am also looking into majoring in kinesiology, the study of fitness. Fitness is something that really spikes my interest over the past years. As someone who strives to reach their goals in fitness, I have a more” scientific” approach to weightlifting. In that, I look at the most efficient way to achieve one’s fitness goal through understanding the exercise literature, understanding one’s biomechanics, and how the muscle should be moving in response to the exercise that they are doing. Other than working out itself, I really wanted to dive into the mental aspect of exercise, and how it plays out with mental health. Most people see what’s happening on the outside, but don’t have a grasp on what’s happening on the inside.

Introduction to “Plates and Dates”

The podcast project was really fun and different from other projects because of how different it was. It was super refreshing to talk instead of writing, personally I am better at talking rather than writing. I struggle to put my thoughts onto paper in an organized way, it has always been easier for me to talk and use my words instead. The goal for the podcast project was to make a podcast that really shows off the ability to dive deeper into topics that students were genuinely interested in. Vinh and I have always talked about our gym journey in class and always discussing the different exercises we do along with the mental health aspects of lifting. We thought it would be more interesting to dive deeper into the mental health aspect. We discuss the mental health benefits, initials fear of the gym, and body dysmorphia. Some inspirations for this podcast were Raw Talk and Mog Cast.

Production

We used the Tascam audio recorder to record. We used the recording studio at the Freestyle Academy, this allowed us to keep the audio clean and easy.

Editing

For editing the audio, we used the industry-standard program “Pro Tools”. This lets us add sound effects in the beginning and add background music.

Final Product

Reflection

This podcast was so much fun to create. It was so refreshing to be able to research topics I genuinely care about and talk about them for a grade. For this project I didn’t really think about the grade or the rubric, I was just having fun researching and talking about the gym. Working with Vinh was really fun because we already talk about the gym so often, it felt very natural, and the podcast felt just like a normal conversation. The podcast was overall a great project, and I am very pleased with the outcome of it.