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This chapter focuses on the links between physical exercise, personal well-being, and performance. Its aim is to introduce applications of physical activity to music and to explore how practitioners can integrate exercise into their lifestyle in ways that can optimize their skills. It considers how different aspects of physical activity — including frequency, intensity, duration, and type — impact on physiological and psychological responses to performance, focusing primarily on the well-documented health benefits of moderate intensity, aerobic-type exercise. However, because of the absence of literature directly applied to musicians, much of the initial evidence and rationale behind the music-specific benefits are drawn from other fields. Nevertheless, research findings from recent studies with musicians are presented in which the effects of both regular and single sessions of exercise (just before performance) have been examined.

This chapter examines how the lack of places and spaces for physical exercise contributes to the problem of obesity. Policies and community/neighborhood infrastructure play a significant role in the prevalence of obesity. In particular, the physical environment can either promote or hinder activities that support health in low-income urban communities of color. In 2006, the Federal Collaboration on Health Disparities Research identified the built environment as a key contributor to health disparities. A social justice perspective provides a lens through which we can better understand the relationship between physical environments and health. The lack of exercise due to an inability or unwillingness to engage in physical activity must be considered in the development of interventions. This chapter looks at the role of the built environment and the obesogenic environment as factors in obesity. It also analyzes the importance of physical spaces in an urban context and how social forces can minimize physical exercise in marginalized urban communities.

This chapter discusses the factors that can affect cancer trends. These include AIDS, air pollution, birthweight, ethnicity, food and nutrient consumption, ionizing radiation, drugs, physical exercise, sexual behaviour, smoking, and ultraviolet radiation.

turn-of-the-century Cairo, practices of living at a distance from the city center and physical exercise were also praised as fostering rationality and producing positive emotions. While contemporaries in the Egyptian capital could draw on the same examples as their counterparts in Berlin, Arabic-language authors did not exclusively refer to “European” ideals. They also discussed specific “Egyptian” antecedents, including physical exercise among the ancient Egyptians. With the spread of suburbs and spaces for physical exercise, these arguments about emotional betterment left material traces in turn-of-the-century Cairo. Looking at these dynamics, the chapter demonstrates that practices of emotional reform in Cairo were bound to a specific class formation. The attempt at creating “rational” and emotionally controlled subjects was tied to the rising influence of the city’s Arabic-speaking, male middle class, which presented itself as the vanguard of the national movement.

This chapter examines the transformation of municipal swimming pools in the United States during the mid- to late 1890s. It explains how popular acceptance of the germ theory of disease transmission rendered pools obsolete as public baths and renewed enthusiasm for athletics and physical exercise among the urban middle class, resulting in the redefinition of municipal pools as sport and fitness facilities. The chapter also considers the exclusion from the pools of working-class boys, who offended pool administrators, and middle-class swimmers, with their rowdy and boisterous behavior, when public officials started to charge entrance fees. It looks at the “natatorium” in Brookline, Massachusetts as an example of how municipal pools were reconceived as sport and exercise facilities and as a site of social and cultural tensions that accompanied their use at the end of the nineteenth century.

This book explores the problem of urban obesity among people of color from individual, family, group, community, and policy perspectives. It charts the history of urban obesity in communities of color and describes various anti-obesity policies and programs, along with the role of social work in addressing this epidemic. The book, premised on a social justice paradigm, examines the social, ecological, environmental, and spatial factors that contribute to urban obesity, such as the food industry's advertising strategies, which promote unhealthy choices; the failure of local markets to provide good food options; the lack of safe spaces for physical exercise; and the paucity of health education. It also considers the connection between food stamps and obesity, as well as the financial and social consequences of this complicated health issue for society as a whole. The book concludes by offering recommendations for effective health promotion programs with the support of the social work profession.

In Berlin, the portrayals of the negative emotional effects of the city ushered in attempts at “reform.” Doctors, real estate developers, and city clerks in the German capital penned publications in which they praised the positive effects of suburbs and physical exercise. Berliners were advised that through activities like breathing fresh air, gardening, and exercising the body, they could strengthen their nerves and bring back calm, positive, and controllable emotions. This notion of emotional betterment drove the spread of several gymnastic and sport clubs, as well as the creation of a number of new suburbs that mushroomed along the fringes of the city. While these developments came with a universal promise of improving Berlin as a whole, a closer look at the practices of emotional reform shows that they often served to rearticulate dividing lines of class and gender.

This chapter considers the process of warming up the voice prior to singing. Listening to singers warm up can be amusing to the uninitiated bystander. What takes place during the warm-up process may be very diverse and of varying value. The technique of warming up the singing voice should be a major part of any systematic vocal pedagogy. Most singers need to have an established warm-up procedure, probably spread out over twenty to thirty minutes. As vocal skill increases, warm-up time tends to diminish. Because the vocal instrument is physical, a graduated program of warming up is as appropriate to singing as to any athletic occasion. It is not advisable to start off singing high-lying phrases, or phrases that traverse the entire range. Before any vocal performance, including voice lessons, and prior to the vocal warm-up itself, the singer needs to do a few minutes of light physical exercise that produces a feeling of elasticity and freedom throughout the body. Warming up is not only essential to the performance-day routine, it should be part of each day's initial vocal work.

This epilogue highlights key themes and issues that will shape the debate and corresponding strategies to address overweight and obesity from this decade into the next. These include the question of whether obesity is a crisis, problem, concern, or epidemic; obesity as an issue of national defense; obesity as genocide; professional opportunities in fighting obesity, especially in the field of social work; community as context and as a vehicle for achieving significant change; the importance of prevention; and the interplay of food, physical exercise, and genetics. The field of health promotion, particularly as it relates to overweight and obesity, is ever expanding, bringing with that growth a host of new rewards and new challenges. The involvement of the social work profession will lead not only to more relevance for marginalized population groups but also to more effectiveness in reducing excessive weight and mitigating its consequences for countless people throughout America.