Feature Image taken by Kenji Tan.
It has been almost 3 months since the beginning of lockdown now and the days have been getting wearier by the day. However, to stay safe, I have persevered within the confines of my own home. This meant that I would need to find ways to exercise at home regularly to stay healthy and fight the tendency to be lazy and not do any physical activity. Physical activity for me before quarantine had been based off of my passion for playing badminton and my goal of making it onto the SAISA team. However, now that I don’t have access to a badminton court and I don’t own a shuttlecock (though I should), I needed another reliable routine to get myself moving. Knowing myself, I knew it would be difficult to make myself do consistent physical exercise as I simply didn’t have the motivation to go out of my way to willingly put myself under physical strain. Therefore, I have decided that a workout app on my phone would help me keep track of my progress and have set workouts that I just have to follow.
Image taken by Kenji Tan.
This way, I wouldn’t have to keep myself in check, but the app would do it for me as it sent me reminders each day to spend some time doing a workout at home. The app is called “Home Workouts” and it works extremely well in a quarantine environment as all it requires is a mat. The app contains a wide variety of workouts targeting specific muscle groups and range from beginner, intermediate, to advanced levels. To be honest I found the beginner levels quite difficult already which goes to show the lack of exercise I had been doing for the past couple of months. Hopefully, this app will help me change that for the better.
Image taken by Kenji Tan.
A particular feature of this app was the 28-day workout challenge where participants must do a workout daily for about 15 minutes and these workouts can change daily to go through a variety of exercises. As this is a challenge, it helps motivate me to do these exercises every day because I now have a strong urge to complete the challenge. Among other things, this has really given me a lot more structure to my day for productivity. I’ve been using this app for almost two weeks and I feel much better about myself for having kept to the regime, even if I sometimes don’t feel like it. This is much better than the alternative of me spending extra time as I would probably be lying on my bed watching Netflix and eating chips. Of course, I still do watch Netflix and eat chips anyways but having some productivity in the day helps counter the excess leisure time I seem to be giving myself these days.
Image taken by Kenji Tan.