Blading Wellness Part 3: Brandon Smith Interview

This is the third part of our series that promotes blading wellness, and ensuring that rollerbladers take care of their body. This time Corey and I sat down with Brandon Smith after the Montreal Classic.

As most of your know, Brandon Smith is an extremely experienced rollerblader. He always seems to have complete control every time he skates.

A recurring theme in our conversation with Brandon was stretching, and how important it is. Most bladers don’t realize how much it can help you to stretch before you skate, and that it’s actually most important to stretch after you skate. Stretching afterwards relaxes all your muscles and prevents soreness the next day. A good 20-30 minute stretch when you get home after a long session will make a huge difference the next day. For more information check out this article on about.com ‘When to Stretch – Why Experts Recommend Athletes Stretch After Exercise’

- Dave

Blading Wellness Part 3: Brandon Smith Interview from RollToronto.ca on Vimeo.

This entry was written by Dave Ghent, posted on September 19, 2009 at 6:34 pm, filed under Interview and tagged Blading Wellness, Brandon Smith. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Shop-Task Re-Design : Interview

I recently noticed the new Shop-Task site re-design, and it thought it looked 100 times better than what was up there before.  Since I am into design myself, I can’t help but think about all the things that go through your mind when a large scale design project goes underway. I caught up with Leon and Aj at Shop-Task to see what their thoughts were.

Q : What were some of the challenges that you found yourself going through during the re-design process?

A: The biggest challenge was to design a new logo. We wanted the logo to be simple, and recognizable but we didn’t want to come up some fancy design that would change our image. Once we had that, the rest of the re-design process was pretty easy. We already knew what we wanted the site to look like.

Q: What did you want to achieve by the new design?

A: We wanted our website to look cleaner, more professional, and easier for our customers. We think with the new design we are able to display our products better.

Q: Blog-Task is extremely popular here in Canada, and it’s important for Shop-Task as well. What were your thoughts when you set that up?

A: Shop Task is a skater owned and operated company and one of our main focuses will always be to promote rollerblading and to help our industry grow. We think that the blog is extremely important to showcase Canadian talent and share it with the rest of the world.

Q: How important is it us, as rollerbladers, to have an online representation of our community?

A: We think it’s extremely important and that’s why we invest so much time, money, and effort into our media. We believe that one central Canadian website with selective content is the key for a proper and professional representation of our community. The outside world doesn’t know enough about our sport and our potential. At the moment the internet is the best tool to show them what we’ve got.

Thanks for the interview Shop-Task.

- Dave

This entry was written by Dave Ghent, posted on September 17, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under Session and tagged AJ Delong, canadian rollerblading, Dave Ghent, shop-task. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Blading Wellness Part 2: Rob G

This is the second part of a series we’re doing to promote blading wellness, and encourage rollerbladers to take care of their bodies. After the first interview with Murda at the Montreal Classic, Corey Grantham convinced Robert Guerrero to sit down with us and share his insights on blading wellness. Rob was a very talkative interviewee, and had a lot of personal experiences to talk about. He strongly believes in stretching and eating well, so we had lots to talk about right off the bat.

One topic that Rob continued to visit was taking care of your joints. He didn’t mention this in his interview, but I thought I would mention the use of glucosamine. I have recently started taking it on a regular basis, to see if it has any effect on the wellness of my joints. The idea here is that if you take a supplement to improve lubrication in your joints, that it will have a positive effect on your body, and therefore improve your skating. But does it work? Thats hard to say. Some people say it does, and some avoid it. It’s hard to measure this sort of thing. One thing you can ask yourself is can you afford to pay about 40 bucks a month to take a pill that might help your body feel better? Is it worth it? Thats up to you.

Rob talks about a number of different things you can do to keep your body in shape – from martial arts training, to eating well, and balancing your mind with your body. But enough out of me, watch the interview and I’m sure you’ll come to your own conclusions.

- Dave

Blading Wellness Part 2: Rob G Interview from RollToronto.ca on Vimeo.

This entry was written by Dave Ghent, posted on September 15, 2009 at 6:12 am, filed under Interview and tagged Blading Wellness, Rob G. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.