My Workout Journey

I’ve never been one to stick to any sort of workout routine. The main reason being is that I just never had confidence in exercising. As a kid I wasn’t into sports or dance or any kind of activity like that. While I loved to roller blade and bike ride I just never really took on sports, even casually. PE was my absolute nightmare and while I was good at running the mile (when I tried) and actually really enjoyed and was decent at Volleyball I just never thought I could actually make it on a team.

Fast forward to after high school and college. Now to quickly preface all of this, I am a lean woman naturally and my metabolism has always been extremely fast. That being said I have been on the slim side my whole life but never “strong” from a muscular standpoint. Once I was in college I started to take my health a bit more seriously. The first point was starting to eat a bit healthier (just for health purposes) and drink a lot more water (unfortunately I frequented UTIs a lot, not a great point in my life). When I went through a phase of being single I decided I wanted to start exercising a bit more. I was obsessed with looking at TUMBLR girls and wanted to tone up my stomach like them. I decided to just focus on running/cardio and doing as many sit ups as humanly possible.

This of course didn’t really lead to much and just made me look even more lanky than I did before. After I met my boyfriend (now husband) I pretty much halted a bit and after about a year and a half of mildly exercising here and there decided to try more body building focused exercises. This lasted about a month for me (seeing a pattern here) and it would be an additional 4 years before I started to be consistent again. That all started after I had some troubles with anxiety and decided to start doing yoga with a coworker of mine. We stayed pretty consistent for a few months but the classes got expensive and our availability to run off to classes lessened.

Now hitting 2020. I decided this was finally the year where I started taking my health more seriously. I wanted to finally feel strong within my body and take on the challenge of just creating more of a lifestyle in exercising vs. goals of toning up or outwardly looking different. My main focus was always how I’d feel internally. After going on a wonderful yoga retreat in January I really started to hit my stride, I started doing at home workouts and yoga and could sense a change coming on. It wasn’t until quarantine hit that I finally was out of distractions and excuses for me not to do a simple 30 minute workout. I’ve found exercises that challenged me and made me sore for days but as I continued pushing myself I’ve not only felt a sense of triumph I’ve also felt a difference in my body. My energy levels are a lot higher and the more I stick with working out during the week the more I WANT to workout when tomorrow or the next day comes. Right now I focus on mainly bodyweight style workouts and my favorites are HIIT since the commitment time is a lot more manageable for me.

I think the most intimidating part for me was always the expectation that you had to keep up with everyone else. To be able to hit so many reps and handle so many weights and run so many miles but in all honesty these low impact slower moving workouts have challenged my body more than anything. Overall I don’t want this post to be about what I specifically do but more so that it takes time to find things that work for you. Everyone’s schedules and thresholds for workouts are different and for myself I decided to start off with Caro Daur’s weekly challenges to get myself to be accountable. From there I gave myself some leniency and went off how I felt and my energy levels but set a small goal of at least 3 workouts a week. Thus far I’ve been tracking my workouts in my phone and I’m currently on week 10. I can see a change in my body and also in my lifestyle, looking forward to exercising and finding it somewhat therapeutic (especially now). It’s crazy to think I used to be too embarrassed to workout thinking I would try and fail but being active has made a positive impact in my life and I’m happy that at least this one positive thing has come from quarantine.