Episode 3: Learn to speak about Fitness and Health English Vocabulary

[Music] Hello friends, welcome back to the English Vocabulary Help Podcast. My goal is to help Intermediate and Advance English speakers build their vocabulary. If you want to become a fluent English speaker, you need to build your vocabulary. And the podcast today will be perfect for learning new words about fitness and health. I love talking about fitness and health, so I'm very excited about the episode today. And my name is Kayla. I'm an English teacher here in America. I teach students from all over the world. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at English with Kayla. And I post daily English vocabulary quizzes. So if you like the words in today's podcast, go on over to my social media. There'll be some quizzes for you. And also you can learn on my website for free English with Kayla.com. I post all my podcasts, my YouTube videos, and things like that. So if you want to see more of my English teaching, you can go there. Okay, so I'm an American teacher, so lots of the words that I teach on this podcast are American words, or they tie into American culture. And I will say here in the United States, we love fitness, we love to work out. Many people think that we are fat here, which is unfortunate. And I think we're getting healthier. But we have things like fast food and unhealthy treats and sweets that make us a little bit fat. But again, we like to focus on losing weight, being healthy. People spend lots of money on gym memberships. We'll talk a lot about it with our vocabulary lesson today. So in today's lesson, we'll talk about 15 words that would be really good to know if you're interested in speaking about fitness or health. Let's get right into our lesson with our first word. The first word is physical. Now this word starts with a pH, which in English makes the F sound. So physical is the first word. And in the United States, we talk about physical education. That's in our schools. It's basically gym class. We're learning about our bodies, physical education. So the word physical means that whatever you're describing has to do with the body. Maybe you're talking about your physical health. That means you're talking about the health of your body. Along with physical, our second word is mental. And mental health is a very common phrase you'll hear in the news in the United States because it's one thing that we're trying to improve in our country. It's mental health mental. I know in British English, if they're trying to say you're crazy, kind of they'll say you're mental. You're absolutely mental, which means you're crazy. But we don't really say that here. We talk about mental health. It talks about how you feel in your mind. Mental health is very important. One thing that can help improve your mental health or your mentality, which means the state of your mind is meditating. So just taking a few minutes where you turn off your phone, you sit in silence, you try to clear your brain of any thoughts. Meditating is good for your mental health or your mind. All right. So we've talked about physical and mental health, which is our body and our mind. One thing that is not good for our body or our mind is stress, stress. So the reason I have stress in this vocabulary lesson is because when we're talking about fitness and health, we don't want to have stress. So stress is a feeling when you have lots of demands on you. So maybe if you're a student, you have many tests coming up that week. You have several papers or essays to write. That's a lot of work. And you're stressed that you won't be able to finish at all. It's like worrying. So it's a very common thing to say here as I'm stressed out. Another way you can use the word stress is you could say, "I want to stress that it's important to study for the upcoming test." That just means you want to emphasize it or you want to bring attention to it. So you can say, "I'm very stressed out," which means I'm very worried, or you could say, "I am going to stress the importance of studying for the test." Or, "I'm going to stress the importance of meditating." Those are two ways to use stress. And let's be honest, stress isn't very bad for your mental health. So hopefully you have a way to minimize or lessen the amount of stress in your life. The next word that we'll talk about is work out, work out. And many people work out in order to decrease their amount of stress. Or you could say, "I am going to do a workout." So, workout can be used as a verb. I'm going to go workout. Or it can be used as a noun. I'm going to do a workout. So a workout is like an exercise session or a training session. Maybe you go lift weights in a gym. Maybe you play a sport for your workout or you go for a run. My personal favorite is running. I like to go outside and run. I don't enjoy running inside on a treadmill for my workout. And I also like to do yoga as a workout. It's like stretching and kind of a meditation, very silent. You can do it at home or in a group. Some people go to workout classes where the instructor tells you what moves to do in order to work out. So basically just working out is moving your body for the purpose of fitness. Along with workout, sometimes we say, "I'm going to train. I'm going to do some training." And this is implied if we're talking about physical fitness or exercise that you are training to get better at a physical skill or you are going to do training for, say, a marathon. You're going to run a very long distance. We know that training can be used in other subjects as well. For instance, you could say, "I'm training at my new job." Maybe you're training to be a teacher or you're training to be an accountant. But when we're talking about fitness, we say, "We're going to go train to run or train to play soccer." We can also use this word reflexively so we could say, "I'm going to train you to get better at soccer. I'm going to train you to get better at basketball." And remember, in North America, in Canada and America, we say soccer instead of football. So if you're not sure what I'm talking about right now, we're talking about football. But we don't say that here because football here is a different sport. All right. So we've talked about working out training. Another word that goes along with that is conditioning or two condition. So if you are conditioning, you're basically just trying to get your heart rate to increase and you're going to do exercising very intensely or running for long periods of time. You're conditioning your body to get used to running or moving. So it's just a type of workout conditioning is. So when I played soccer, I played soccer for many years. We had to do tons of conditioning in practice. We would do running drills and our coach would make us do many sprints, which is fast running up and down the field. So that we didn't get tired during the games. So conditioning helps get your body ready to do something very intense physically. Let's move on to sort of a slang word that we use in the United States. If you ever watch a show and the person's talking about their fitness, they may say, "I'm going to do some cardio first or I'm going to do cardio today." I was watching a video with the rock. I don't know if you know him. He's an action movie star. He used to be a professional wrestler in a American football player, but he said, "I like to do cardio first in my workout." And what that means is just the running part of your workout. It's not different than conditioning, but it's used more casually. Like you're not really conditioning to get into shape for something, which we'll talk about in a minute. And you're not really conditioning to get ready for a sport. You're just trying to be fit. You're trying to get exercise in and you'll say, "I'm going to do cardio as opposed to lifting weights." So it just means maybe you're going to get on the treadmill or maybe you are going to to go on a bike, you're getting your heart rate up. Cardio can be used as a noun or a verb. So it's just any activity is cardio that makes you run. And the verb I will do cardio. Just like a workout, you do a workout, you do cardio. Doing cardio is really good for sports and it's good for your heart's health to get your heart beating fast and start breathing hard. This is a bonus word. This is not on my list for you today, but you can get something called a runner's high. And it's not like you're high on drugs or alcohol or anything. It's just you run so much that your body and your mind feel really good, almost as if you were high on drugs or something like that. But that's a common phrase we use in the United States. We say, "I have a runner's high," which means you just feel great after doing cardio or working out. All right. Let's move on to a phrase that I already mentioned in today's lesson. And the phrase is to get into shape or just get in shape. So it's a phrase or verb to become physically fitter by exercising or doing physical activity. To get into shape. So many people would say this after they've been lazy all winter, maybe they've gained a few pounds or gained a few kilograms. We say pounds here in the United States if you didn't know. He'll say, "Oh, after a long winter of being lazy, I need to get into shape. I need to get into shape for summer." Or, "I need to get in shape for summer." Just means you want your body to look better. So what you're going to do is exercise and start eating healthier because you know you're going to have to be in a swimsuit soon and you don't want to look fat, basically. And like I said, we're kind of a weight loss obsessed culture in America. We're concerned about having a healthy weight, but we have lots of unhealthy food that makes that hard goal to have. So let's talk about that word weight loss, weight loss. So you can lose weight, which means you'll weigh less, your body will become smaller. And when we talk about weight loss, you talk about a time that your body got smaller. Maybe you focused a lot on running every day and that helped your body lose weight or that was your weight loss. And we talk about having a weight loss goal. Maybe you'll hear an American say, "I need to lose 20 pounds." My weight loss goal is 20 pounds. That would be a pretty good weight loss. Another thing that Americans do quite often is go on a diet. So this is a noun, diet. Maybe you've heard it in two ways. You could say, "My diet is being a vegetarian." Or, "My diet consists of many fruits and vegetables and just a little bit of sweets." So just talking about what you eat. A diet is what you eat. A diet could also just be your plan to eat healthier. So you could say, "I'm going on a diet." This implies that you're going to try to eat healthier. Or there is different diets that are supposed to help you lose weight, which in my opinion can be. It can be hard to start a diet that's very different from how you would eat normally. It's almost unsustainable, like you won't be able to do it for a long time. So a popular diet in the United States is the ketogenic diet. Maybe if you're on Instagram, you'll see someone say #Keto, which means there's no carbs. So you're not eating any sugar or bread or things like that. And it will help your body lose weight, but it's hard to eat like that for a long period of time. People on the keto diet just eat meat and vegetables. All right, another type of diet or just kind of a nutrition. So eating term that you'll hear people say is I am going to eat fat-free or I am going to eat sugar-free. So you're taking the word that describes the food. So fat, sugar, calorie, maybe. Well, no, calorie doesn't work in the situation. Just we'll start with just fat or sugar-free. Or we have gluten here. Not sure if you're aware of gluten. It's in bread. Some people in the United States don't eat gluten. Not sure if that's a common phenomenon in other places of the world. Some people do have an allergy, but here, a lot of times, people just cut it out by choice. I say it makes them feel better. So if you eat fat-free, it means you will not eat any fat in your food. And some people think that might help them lose weight. And if you eat sugar-free, it means you won't have any sugar in your food. So you'll see that sometimes on food labels as well, it will say sugar-free on the soda can. And that means there's no sugar in it. And maybe there's a chemical sugar, a synthetic type of sugar. You'll see that a lot in the supermarket. Do you know the word for when you want a food so bad? You just feel, oh, I want some chocolate so bad right now. It's called a craving. Craving. Craving is where I'm going to talk about today, because when you are on a diet or trying to eat healthy, sometimes you see a food that you want so bad that you are craving it. You just can't get it out of your mind. So you could say it as a noun. Like, it's a powerful desire for something. I have a craving. Or you can say it as a verb to crave something or desire it. I crave chocolate right now. Chocolate is a really common craving. When women are pregnant, sometimes they have strange cravings, like they crave pickles, or they crave salty foods. My last three terms for you today are, I would say more slang terms here in the United States. They're pretty popular, especially on social media, because there are so many fitness and wellness and health accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms that you might see these there. The first one is pumping iron, pumping iron. So this is a total slang word that you'll hear. A lot of guys men say, it just means that you're lifting weights. You're lifting the iron weights. Now, the weights don't literally have to be iron, but it's just the term that we use. So here's my example sent in to you. The strong man was pumping iron at the gym. If you feel like really excited after you work out, you'll say, "Oh, I was pumping iron today." Again, just a slang phrase that we use here. Another slang phrase that I think is worth mentioning is Fittsbow. Fittsbow. So this is actually an Instagram hashtag. That's really common. So if you're trying to get followers on Instagram to follow your fitness account, you'll say #Fittsbow, which is just short for fitness inspiration. So maybe you'll post a picture of you after you've lost weight. And you look amazing and you want to inspire others to live a healthy lifestyle. You'll say #Fittsbow. Lots of times I see women doing beautiful yoga poses. Maybe they're doing a handstand upside down. They'll say #Fittsbow. It's supposed to make you feel motivated to work out. All right, the last one. Now, the world makes one of America because we like our guns. But when we're talking about fitness, our guns do not talk about weapons. We're speaking about our arms or our biceps. Now, this is like a total joking manner. We usually use this. You'll say, look at these big guns I have. You're not talking about weapons. You're talking about your arms. So it's kind of a joke. Maybe your guns are getting bigger from pumping iron. (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to this episode of the English vocabulary help podcast. I'm teacher Kayla living here in the United States. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook @EnglishWithKeyla. And please visit my website, EnglishWithKeyla.com for free English vocabulary help. 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