Fitness Check-in and Some Observations
I’ve completed the first 7 days of my 30 Day Exercise Challenge. I must say that so far it’s been a very positive experience. I can really see myself completing this challenge. I find that I look forward to my exercise each day, and am trying to find more and more variety in my exercise choices.
I’ve also revamped slightly the layout of how I’ve been tracking my progess. I flipped the Monday-Sunday format I was using so that it’s now laid out like this:
Su:
Sa:
F:
Th:
W:
T:
M:
This way I can more easily see the progression of what exercises I’ve done over the past week. I also set up a Fitness Tracking Archives page to make it a bit easier to edit the main tracking page each week.
Having the large variety of exercises to choose from assures that you’re not going to overstress or injure a specific body part by overtraining. The other thing that helps is knowing that it’s so easy to be successful. If my schedule only allows me to walk one of my walking routes, then I’ve successfully exercised that day. If it happens to be raining that day I have alot of other indoor options to choose from. The key is choices, choices, choices and structuring those choices in such a way that “exercising” can mean spending 4 minutes doing crunches on the ball.
I think the thing that most people miss about exercise is that the effects are cumulative. A little bit of exercise every day goes much further than alot of exercise engaged in sporadically. Exercising every day is more of a philosophical life choice. We often hear ourselves saying “I don’t have the time to exercise”, but that’s just not true. More specifically what we’re saying is “I don’t have 2 hours to spend going to the gym”, which might be absolutely true. By making their definition of exercise so rigid most people rob themselves of an opportunity to be healthy and fit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making gym membership a part of your life if it’s something that you can afford and have the time to do. But it’s much more difficult to fit that two hours into your life consistently if that’s your only exercise option.