Whoever said high school is the best time of your life certainly did not do the IB programme.
School reopened after the summer about two months ago and I am pretty sure I could count all the times I left my house for something non-school-related on one hand. Since it is my last year, I have been swarmed with IAs, assignments, tests, and all kinds of work so all my attention has been focused on just getting through the weeks that I have been neglecting physical activity. However, my resolution at the end of this summer was to break out of my rigid system and make an effort to consistently go to the gym even amongst the work and stress as a means to get some activity into my routine and prevent all my muscles from atrophying as I sit at my desk. My mother has always avidly professed the importance of regular exercise in my routine and put me into the habit of going to the gym since I was 14. Now, three years down the line, the gym has grown to be an excellent escape for me as I am able to take a break from studying or working while doing activities that are good for me and leave me with a sense of productivity.
Initially, my goals for the gym were extremely superficial and entirely founded in my desire for abs (still waiting for the day I get them 😔), but as the years have gone by, my ambitions for what I hope to achieve by going to the gym have grown more noble. These past two months, I have been trying to instill good habits of healthy eating and regular exercise to test my self-management in preparation for university. As someone who is very susceptible to burnout, when I think about university, my primary concern at the moment is whether I will be able to multitask and to do activities which will bring me out of my tunnel-visioned, hyper-focused phases when I have a ton of work and that can be incredibly beneficial for my mental and physical health. So far, though it has been tricky, I have been going to the gym 2-3 times a week for roughly 1 hour or swimming for 45 minutes on days when I do not have time for the gym, and I have noticed how the change in my daily routine actually promotes my academic productivity. I know being more productive after exercising isn’t some unique discovery that no one has ever told me about, but after actually seeing how my productivity differs between days when I exercise versus ones where I don’t, I am starting to understand why people have been telling me to do this for so long.
Overall, I have been working hard towards my goal of going to the gym to instill good habits and a healthy routine which balances all aspects of my life (academic, social, and physical). I am happy with my progress so far, and I am seeing a noticeable change in my efficiency, which is motivating me to continue even as it gets harder to keep up with the routines. Before recently, I do not think I fully understood how stuck I was in the same routine, nor did I understand how my routine was not serving me and my ambitions as well as they could have been. For this reason, even a small thing like taking an hour out of my day to exercise is proving to have such an immense positive impact and setting me up for future success as I prepare for life on my own.
Excuse the fact that I do not have many pictures of/at the gym atthe moment (it’s very embarrassing trying to document yourself in a public place), but in the meantime, I have this compilation of my life over the past two months and one of the pool!
