After I wrote my post last week about my workouts, I was having a lot of thoughts about how things are going. I’m trying to stay optimistic about my time of working out at home being close to done. I still don’t know for sure when I will be able to be vaccinated, so it’s still a little unknown when I will feel safe to go to the outdoor workouts. But I feel like there is a finish line that I’m coming up to now. So that was making me feel pretty good.
But I have been feeling down about my workouts for a while. I don’t think there is any denying that. I’m sure it can be read in my posts. I’m not happy with what I’m able to do. I don’t have the options that I want to have a tough workout and it’s hard to not compare myself to my past self. I know that this time is not normal and I have to give some flexibility in what is possible. And in the end, I will be grateful that I made it through this time and not worried about how my workouts went. And I know that to be true, but it doesn’t help when I’m not feeling great about my workouts and wondering if I’m just doing the home workouts to feel better about myself but I’m not doing anything to make myself better.
And then a friend and I were talking and they said something that I didn’t consider before. While I know cardio is important to do, it’s not easy to do in my house. I do try to use my jump rope when I can, but I dream of the day I can get back on the rowing machine. I’m still on a waitlist for renting one, but I’m guessing I won’t be getting one until after I’m back at my regular workouts. So cardio to me is just frustrating and feels impossible. And the negative things I mention in my workout recaps are often about my lack of strength. So my friend suggested that I try to just do weightlifting workouts.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this as an option. But once they said it, it seemed like something I needed to try and see how I did. So I did a little research online and found a good and basic weightlifting plan. It’s a full-body weightlifting plan (so I don’t have things like back or leg days) and just did that for my workouts last week. And it was a different feeling for sure. I still was frustrated when I was thinking about how I used to be able to squat with one weight and now I’m below that. Or how I was getting tired with lower reps than I was used to. But it wasn’t as frustrating as my workouts with cardio have been.
And even though there wasn’t technically a cardio element to the workout, I was getting my heart rate up just by doing the exercises back to back. And another thing that was nice was that it was a bit faster for me to do that workout than the video workouts I had been doing. I wasn’t taking as many breaks to see the next workout moves and could quickly move from one thing to another. And when I have limited time before work, a shorter workout is good. It still took me about 30-35 minutes each time, but it was packed with workout time and almost no break time.
I don’t know if I feel a huge difference in my body, but it was nice to not feel as let down by my workouts. And because it seems like so little in my life is stable these days, I am writing this now and for all I know, I will have a totally new plan this week. But as I have written so many times in the past 11 months, I just have to keep going and keep trying and not give up. And that’s exactly what I’ll keep doing. And if that means just doing weightlifting and strength work, I’ll do that. If it means I keep changing every week, I’ll do that. I guess I’ll just have to see where my fitness inspiration comes each week.
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