Deliverable

Today was the 30th day of my exercise challenge, and I’ve done my exercise for today! This is definitely something that I want to continue for another 30 days.

Some observations:

• I think that keeping my definition of exercise pretty loose was a good choice, and made this challenge doable. I’d like to find a ways to challenge myself over the next 30 days to increase my fitness level even more. Not sure how that’s going to work yet.
• It’s probably worth noting that I’ve felt more balanced over the past 30 days. My mood has stayed pretty positive and I feel as though I’m gaining momentum in other areas of my life. I’m sure that the consisent exercise has played a part in this.
• At one point I tweaked my shoulder abit, which made doing upper body work inadvisable. I shifted my focus to cardio and core until my shoulder healed. The variety of my exercise choices enabled me to do this.
• There were some days that I ended up doing my set of push-ups (or ab work) late at night. In some ways this felt like cheating, but I also feel that it showed my commitment to the challenge. It’s not optimal to exercise right before bed, so I need to find a way to consistently exerise in the morning to combat this. Also, if I exercise in the morning I have more opportunity throughout the day to do more exercise, which should help with the “challenge myself more” comment above.
• I began unofficially tracking my cardio a few days ago. I’d like to find more benchmarks for fitness like this. (Cardio and flexibility are the first two that jump to mind.) I don’t want to get into a whole macho “I can benchpress a ton of weight” thing, but it would probably be helpful to have ways to judge my overall fitness level.

This was a very positive experience. It will be interesting to see what the next 30 days holds for me, especially since I’m considering doing the introductory week of Bikram yoga beginning this Saturday. We’ll see what happens.

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30 Day Challenge: Exercise
Start date: Wednesday, 6/21/06
Next check-in date: Thursday, 7/20/06

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 1:44 pm and is filed under 30 Days. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.