My goal for this spring is to get back in shape. Growing up and through college, I had always been extremely active. I started at around 3 years old with ballet, and then as a kid, I played pretty much every sport in the book in both school and city league teams. At the end of middle school, I went back to dancing, and was dancing 2-3 hrs/day, 5 times a week for the next 5 years. When I started college, my dancing began to decline due to a lack of resources and scheduling, but I still exercised at the gym when I could.
About 6 months ago, I cancelled my gym membership because the classes weren’t that great and all I’d so there was elliptical. So I bought my own dinky (but perfectly functional) elliptical and am now ellipticalling at home for 30 min/day, 2 times a week, and that’s about it. Being in grad school and doing research has made exercising consistently difficult, but I could definitely still be more proactive about my fitness. I hope to exercise more again in order to improve my cardiovascular health, build back strength, reduce stress, and gain back more of that healthy, alive feeling that I had before.
My goal is to get up to 30-45 minutes of cardio 5 times/week and to diversify the kinds of exercise I’m doing so I’ll be in better overall shape. I will try to slowly add back running (a recently failed mission due to several injuries), and strength training (never done it), and hope to pick up other types of exercise like hiking in the local mountains, playing tennis with my dad, biking, or taking a random exercise class here and there. I was thinking of joining an adult league, but being able to devote specific and consistent time to a group isn’t something I think I can achieve with my inconsistent and often hectic schedule. Hopefully, my strategy will make exercising more fun too. This will help me stay motivated past the end of spring.
