I actually did some exercise!

Like most of the nation, I’ve started on Joe Wicks’ P.E classes on YouTube and for the first few days my legs were killing me, I felt like an old man. But I know I needed to start doing something like this. I haven’t done any serious exercise since I left secondary school which is closer to ten years ago than I’d like it to be. Now my diet has never been amazing, but there has been vegetables and fruit present in some form or other. But they haven’t been as prominently featured as they should have been. I’ve always enjoyed watching sports (probably shown by how many posts on this site have been about various different sports) and I was usually up for a game of football at school but exercise has not been a big part of my life for a long time. As a result, being aged 24, I have to admit to having a spare tyre around my waist. And frankly that isn’t a very good look. No other part of my body is like that so it just looks like a beer belly or a pot belly. I don’t like that, but I wasn’t motivated enough to do anything about it.

Now this isn’t going to turn into a fitness journal. I won’t be doing before and after photos, or write about my routine and my diet and all things I’m doing. One, because I don’t want to, and two, plenty of other bloggers have done something like that before to greater success than I could manage. The point of me writing about this however is that, one I didn’t have anything else to write about, and two, because this is a major change in my lifestyle that I’m trying to implement. Since my latter teenage years to 10 days ago, I did not exercise regularly at all. Sometimes, I would go out for a run, and I kind of hopped on that bandwagon for a while, but I also fell off it fairly quickly. And I think that’s because when you aren’t used to exercising, doing work-outs, going for runs, your muscles simply aren’t used to being taxed that much. That’s why I was hobbling around like an old man for three or four days. Only if you stick at it do your muscles repair and maintain their new capacity. But, it is so easy to simply stop doing the work-outs or running or whatever form of exercise you decide on because your muscles hurt.

And that is something I have been guilty of doing in the past, picking something up, hoping for a particular result, not getting it and refusing to ever do the thing ever again (as I’ve written about previously on this blog). But, at 24 I realise/ grudgingly admit that I need to do something to make sure that I’m actually reasonably healthy and not suffering from any gut problems or something more serious by the time I’m 34. So however reluctantly, I committed myself to doing the first week of work-outs that Mr Wicks had posted and it’s actually just become part of my morning routine. My legs aren’t seriously aching anymore and I do feel more awake and ready for the rest of day having done it. I do the work-outs at about the same time he streams the latest one, so it’s done by about half past 9 or ten o’clock.

I know I won’t see results straight away and I may even need to throw in an ab-centric work-out now and then to try and shift some of the bulk. But I don’t feel really terrible for having started it, and I’m not going to drop it. The next step will be to try and curb some of my bad eating habits to try and shift it even quicker, but one step at a time, eh?