“Exercise if the only thing keeping me from sleeping the whole day.”

– Based on a True Story.

What a strange time to be alive.

I’ll cut to the chase: today’s blog will be focusing on self-care. In specific, exercise. I think this statement is fairly straight forward but seriously, you should exercise during quarantine, ideally every day. And I’m not talking about some intense 2-hour workout daily but at least 30 minutes of your day should be spent doing some physical activity.

We may not realize it but we sit for about 10 hours a day (excluding the time we sleep) and trust me, that is everything but healthy. Sitting for prolonged periods is associated with increased risks of certain types of cancers, even so, please, for your sake, take this seriously. I try to start every day with a workout but if I can’t do it in the morning, I do it in the evening. The exercises I do are quite diverse which I like because I find it boring and unmotivating to repeat the same circuits or exercises over days and weeks. I’ve been consistently working out over the last three weeks and below if just a breakdown of what I have been doing. I hope this blog gives at least one person the motivation to follow some scheduled plan for working out and staying healthy. On a side note, I also recommend not sitting down during online classes and standing up during sessions because it helps blood flow and for capillaries to develop, which is associated with improved efficiency and concentration for working.

Week 1, 2 and 3

Used many of the workouts recommended by our PE teachers and sometimes did my own routine. I used various HIIT videos each time and I didn’t stick to just one because, as I mentioned above, I like variety.

• Monday: 25-min Power Yoga + 10-min Core [Alexis Ren]
• Tuesday: 20 or 30-min HIIT [SELF] + 10-min Core [Alexis Ren]
• Wednesday: 20 or 30-min HIIT [SELF] + 10-min Core [Alexis Ren]
• Thursday: 7-min Body Combat + 20-min HIIT [SELF] + 10-min Core [Alexis Ren]
• Friday: 7-min Body Combat + 14-min Body Combat + 10-min Core [Alexis Ren]
• Saturday: Free Choice [Do What You Like Day]
• Sunday: Rest Day

Since I had virtual learning classes on the weekdays, I would get up at about 7 am, sometimes even earlier, and start my workout session by about 7.40 and finish with enough time to shower and get to homeroom. This was the first time I had ever done power yoga and I must say, it was an absolutely fantastic way to start each week! I would choose to do power yoga on the weekends also with my mother and it was truly refreshing. Both my parents would sometimes join when I did HIIT workouts and it was great fun to do it with family, albeit being exhausted by the end of it. I was very much used to HIIT workouts, given that even in school I did body conditioning where I mostly did T-25 workouts which are quite similar in certain aspects. But the winner I would say is body combat. I had never done it before and it was so incredibly fun! The workouts got my heart pumping and it was fascinating learning so much new boxing moves like the uppercut, hook, and the jab-cross combo. It reminded me of dancing, to be honest, a more aggressive type of it, but the flow of the movements, the routines and pace, it was all so much like dance.

Week 4 and 5

Week 4 was a bit rocky. It’s not that I didn’t want to work-out but I was feeling rather sick and the whole routine I had been following the past three weeks was boring me now. I got through it though, doing each of the above-mentioned workouts on each day but I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. So, I devised my own work-out. I wanted to do a mix of body combat, HIIT, core-workout, and I wanted it to target my whole-body, not just a select few regions. And this was where the ‘Triple 100’ originated. As the name suggests, it’s a work-out consisting of three sets, one targeted at the upper body, one for core, and the other for the lower body, with 100 reps per set. For the upper body and lower body sets, I gave myself a 30-second recovery period after each task, and between each set, there was a 1.5-minute recovery period. As I got better at the work-out, I reduced the recovery periods until there were only the recovery periods between each set left. The tasks in the triple hundred were very diverse and challenging. I loved the feeling of my whole body being put to work, albeit being exhausted both physically and mentally by the end. But I wanted to even modify this by the fifth week.

The fifth week started off incredibly sloppy. I didn’t exercise up till Wednesday because of abdominal pains and fatigue but when I got back to it on Thursday, I further enhanced the ‘Triple 100’ to a completely new challenge, the ‘Triple Mountain Challenge’. I call it this because it has a similar set up to the ‘Triple 100’, with three sets, each per different area of the body, but the exercises are very different. I call it a mountain because that’s exactly how it is: for each of the sets, you start with a certain exercise and it ends with the same one. Basically, you do a bunch of exercises, and once completed, you do each exercise in reverse order, so you end with one you began with. That is repeated per each set. This was more challenging but much more engaging for me and I felt it left a stronger mark on my body.

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On a final note, seriously, exercise. Do anything really, it’s so much better in the long run for you and change it up. Don’t give yourself the lee-way of being lethargic or fed-up of ding the same thing. Take it from Nike and JUST DO IT!