Hands up folks going a bit stir crazy during lockdown... 🙌🏻 Guessing I've got about as many hands up as I have readers! (So not many, but thank you those of you who do read this) I thought that maybe I'd turn to a topic I never dreamed I'd one day be blogging about: exercise.
I love sports and always have. At school, I was that kid who was always doing one sport or another: volleyball, hockey, tennis, basketball, badminton, netball, tag rugby... the list goes on. What I've always hated though? Exercise for the sake of exercise. Put me on a hockey pitch and I'll chase the ball for a full 90 minutes and love it. Put me on a running track and I'm pleased if I make it 90 seconds! Everything hurts, I hate being out of breath, and it seems I hold my jaw so tense when running that it can still be aching the next day. Eww. Gross. Please don't make me do it.
Then lockdown hit. No hockey allowed, volleyball cancelled, even the tennis courts locked. I moved back in with my parents at the start of Lockdown 1.0, and for my fitness I couldn't have made a better decision.
Firstly, living in East Devon we are incredibly lucky to be able to do a completely different walk every day of the week without getting in the car. Partly, getting outside has just helped keep us sane. We're keeping a bird list for each month this year and out walking is when we record most of our species. It also means we can get moving and take a break from laptop screens, the TV, and the same four walls. I can't stress enough how important it is to factor a walk in every day, especially while home working, but I'd guess after this year I'm probably preaching to the converted. While doing my Masters, getting out for a walk was often the only time I left the house, got fresh air, or felt the sun. While at the time I didn't necessarily feel it making a difference to the stresses of thesis writing and statistical analysis, looking back I think I would have reached breaking point without my little wanderings with the dog.
Sadly, walking isn't exactly intensive cardio and when sport isn't an option, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and get your sweat on! Since March 2020 my Mum has had me doing 4 or 5 online exercise classes a week (check out Paula Ferris at Positive EnerJe Health & Fitness on YouTube - she's really good and an absolutely lovely person with it!) and honestly I'm fitter than I have ever been in my life. I can't say it's particularly changed my opinion of exercise (seriously, who are you people that love the burning pain of exhausted muscles ready to collapse?!), but actually without that I wouldn't be in any shape to do anything remotely active now that I've submitted my thesis. What Paula gave me was a routine. 9:30am Monday and Wednesday, 6:30pm Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. If you'd asked me to just "at some point in the week, do five lots of 30 minutes of hard exercise", I'd have said that yes I can do that easily... and then never done it. If you want to get fit, I think the best thing you can do is find a live instructor so there's no option to just keep putting it off all day until bedtime and then "do it tomorrow". (The other thing is to find one who mixes it up so you never do the same workout twice - once I know what's coming, I find it much harder to keep going!)
The routine not only helped me to stay in shape, but I honestly think that without it I wouldn't have got my Masters finished. It wasn't that it woke me up in the mornings or gave me a time to stop in the evenings, because I always started at 8:30am and continued well into the evening. The difference was that because my body was fit, I was feeling good. I felt more awake during the day and slept better at night, and that let me concentrate properly. OK there were some days where it had the opposite effect - when every model I tried to run failed or I found the hundredth mistake in my dataset, and then I was told to do a sit up and couldn't, that felt like true failure. Those were not productive days... but the next day I'd get up and try again, and the next day was always better and I'd realise that actually I wasn't such a failure after all. The exercise also gave me targets that were entirely unrelated to my Masters. I already mentioned the many errors in my dataset. I went for about six weekly meetings in a row where my supervisor asked me "What have you achieved this week?" and my answer was "I found yet more errors so now I'm up to where I thought I was last week"... Six. In. A. Row. Every week my target was to have something new to show by the following meeting, and every week I had nothing. I'd have felt like a complete failure if it wasn't for the improvements I was seeing in my fitness. If I hadn't been able to feel myself jumping higher, sprinting faster, holding planks for longer, lifting heavier weights, I think I would have broken then and there, but somehow knowing I was improving at the exercise convinced me that I would succeed with my data too.
End of a workout always leaves us a little red in the face!
The last thing I have to say is just a handy little trick I've discovered for staying awake during Zoom talks. I don't know about you, but I cannot stay awake during a seminar or talk. I swear it doesn't matter how interested I am in the research being discussed, I have to concentrate so much on battling my eyelids that I don't hear a word the speaker says. It's SO frustrating. At the moment though, no problem! Over Zoom I can stay awake and here's how: strength training and stretches. I suspect it would be frowned upon to get up in the middle of a lecture and start doing press ups on the stairs, but in your own living room you can just turn off your camera and microphone and work on the abs while listening to the speaker. Nothing too energetic or you stop listening, but things like planks, sit ups, press ups, calf raises, deadlifts and weight training I find really help to focus my mind on the talk, rather than on how nice it would be to curl up under the duvet with a purring kitty cat. Seriously, next time you feel yourself dozing off in a meeting, turn off the camera and do some yoga - it helps!
Just remember one thing. Exercise doesn't have to be hard. Our New Year's Resolution for 2021 is to do 2021 burpees, 2021 press ups and 2021 sit ups this year. That's only 5 or 6 a day. OK yes that's not many and isn't going to be winning us any fitness prizes but it's better than nothing. Just getting up once an hour and stretching WILL help your fitness compared to remaining seated, you just have to get on and do it. As Paula would say: #Team #Strong #Together.
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