Ball Kicking and its Benefits

Short entries that chronicle my life don't make for an enjoyable reading experience. I know that for a fact because I also started having nightmares after reading back the previous couple of posts. Even more worrying is that I have received emails from several concerned mums who reported that since the past few days, their children have been talking about how they 'never want to go online again' and 'that awful blog'. 

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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It has always been said that due to the enormous range of topics to cover, apart from reading, medical students do not have time for other worldly activities such as exercise. In fact, I remember a prominent ophthalmologist saying that the only exercise back during her student days was walking back and forth from the hospital. 

But that's all in the past now and with the advent of digital SLRs, the iPhone and Kopi Jantan, medical students are expected to not only become bookworms, but healthy bookworms. It is because of that very reason that I took up playing indoor football which is funnily enough called futsal.

Futsal is a godsend for city folks who have neither the time nor the perfectly mowed fields to play proper football on. Futsal is played on an artificial piece of turf about the size of a basketball court with its perimeter covered by a net. It's said that the net is to keep the ball from going places as a result of disastrous ball kicking skills, but I suspect that its real purpose is to keep unruly opponent benchwarmers from stepping in and stirring up a fuss during a match.

Now, I've been playing the sport long enough to tell you that the amount of stamina required is no less than that required from playing football on the field. In fact, from my careful observations (and also from the exhaustive hours put into the game), I can say with confidence that futsal is a much, much more physically challenging game. This is because a lot of energy is used up to perform skills and stunts that are a requisite for the game, for example: running, dribbling the ball and shouting taunts at your opponents who have just missed an easy shot. It goes without saying that that latter takes up most of the energy expenditure.

Futsal is great in the sense that you can play it at any time under any weather condition. This is something that medical students are extremely grateful for since they're too tired to play in the afternoon after a whacked out day at the hospital, so they usually arrange for late night games (particularly in the range of 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.) so that they can continue to feel whacked out during tomorrow's ward rounds.

Yes, futsal is one of Man's better innovations I have to admit that. But in the end, it is also the same innovation that gave me a twisted knee a couple of weeks back -.-"