I made it to the gym again today, which felt amazing again.
My exercises of choice are Crossfit, open water swimming and occasionally running.
CrossFit is a global fitness sport, I was introduced to it seven years ago when a new box opened in my city and I’ve loved it ever since, despite being a personal trainer myself and able to create my own workouts. I love that the very core of CrossFit is that it’s constantly varied, the idea being that it prepares you for anything life might throw at you.
Being global, the great thing about CrossFit is that they have a number of workouts which are called benchmark workouts, the standards for these are set and anyone across the globe can do them, log their scores and see how they compare with other people. This is a great way to monitor your fitness as you could repeat certain workouts at set intervals to see how you are doing, these benchmark workouts are a double-edged sword because as much as they can show improvement they can also show when you have lost fitness too. In my early days of CrossFit , my scores on the board so to speak meant something to me and I would agonise over them for days if I didn’t feel like I’d performed as I should have done and there have been many tears post workout when logging the score and realising you’ve done worse than you have done before.
However, as I’ve matured I now take my scores with a pinch of salt, yes I like to see myself improving but don’t give it a second thought if I haven’t, all I care about is moving my body and feeling the buzz from exercising and knowing that I’m improving my health with each workout.
I will though during this year pick a number of workouts to use as measurements of progress (SMART goals), one of these is a 2000m row, I love indoor rowing (my body shape is well suited to it). When I was at the peak of my fitness I was able to do this in under 8 minutes which is pretty good going. I did this workout today and did it in exactly 9 minutes which I’m really happy with considering I’ve not exercised consistently for over 6-8 months and done very little rowing in that time. Taking one minute off my time might seem like a lot but I know that if I consistently go to the gym and work on it then it’s do-able in 12 months.
After my workout I headed to a local lake for a quick dip to cool down, this is my normal Sunday routine and I love it!! Open water (OW) swimming is fairly new to me, I’ve only been doing it a couple of years and again like CrossFit I started off trying to swim as far as possible in the sessions and it made it feel more like a chore that had to be done and for a while I stopped enjoying it. Then I realised that I was doing enough other exercise that the OW swim could be just for pleasure, I don’t put any expectations on myself when I get in the water, I simple swim for however long I feel like and just enjoy the sensation of being in the water. And even better today it started to rain, this is my favourite thing in the world, it makes you feel so alive and at one with nature, if you’ve not tried it, then you are missing out!!
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