When I set my monthly challenge for February, I had no idea I’d basically be forced into sleeping better in order to get over the cold I caught. I was going to bed earlier and could sleep in because I wasn’t going to my workouts. I think the last time I got that much sleep was when I was out of work and was not getting up too early to work out in the morning.
And getting that much sleep that week proved how much I really needed to work on my sleep schedule. I’m back to getting up as early as I normally do since I’m back to my workouts, so my focus has to be on what time I get to bed. There are some nights when I’m getting to bed a lot earlier than I used to and there are other nights when I’m noticing I’m staying up too late. But even those later nights are still not as bad as they used to be. I’m averaging about an hour more sleep a night, which is a start. I want to get it up a bit higher, but that will take some time. But at least I’ve made a start that I can build off of. This is a work in progress, but it’s the most progress I’ve made on this goal that I’ve had for myself for a long time.
And for this month, I’m doing another health-related challenge and it’s inspired a bit by the time when I was sick. After I took a week off from my workouts, I did notice that I had gotten a bit weaker. This was expected since I had to take time off, but it was frustrating. And since I’ve been back, I’ve been really wanting to build my strength back up. But as I’ve been doing that, I also have wondered if I’ve been stagnant with what I have been doing. So this month, I want to challenge myself to find where I can be stronger and work harder in my workouts.
I know that there are some parts of my workouts that might be easier to build upon than others. I think it will be hardest to have improvements with my rowing, but I know I can still try. But because of some physical restrictions, there is only so much I can do. I’ll see what can happen when I try, but I’m not setting any crazy expectations. But I think I can make some good improvements on the bike and with the floor work. I want to see if I can increase the resistance level on the bike a bit more for some of the workouts and also see if I can pedal faster when I’m using the levels I’ve been using for a while. And on the floor, I know it’s not just as easy as using heavier weights, but I should be more comfortable with testing out the heavier weights to see if it’s possible or if I could do some of the reps with the heavy weights before using my normal ones. This isn’t the most straightforward progress, but they are steps toward improvement and that’s what I need to be ok with doing.
As much as I’d love to see super fast progress and immediately have improvements in my workouts, I think seeing how my sleep improvement went made me remember that any steps of progress are good. So even if I end March with marginal improvements, that will still put me ahead of where I am now. And if I can make small improvements every month or every other month, that will add up over time. All I can do is try and see what happens over the course of this month and hopefully, there will be some changes that I can continue over time so I see some big improvements and changes at the end of the year.
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