Fitness - 30 Day Challenges

Disclaimer: Fitness is not the same as weight loss. If you find yourself obsessing over your weight, workouts and the food that you eat, please seek medical attention or at least help from a friend. I struggle with this myself and I will always try to focus on how my body feels and how much stronger it gets instead of focusing on a scale. Do not compare your journey to others. You are only in competition with yourself. I only share this information as a way to express my experience and hopefully give people new ideas for their fitness journey. If you ever feel like my words are triggering in anyway, please let me know. It's very important to me that everyone feels empowered by fitness and not demeaned in anyway.

My New Year's Resolution

Like many of you, one of my resolutions is to continue getting healthier. I feel like each year I make some small steps towards this goal and I'm happy to be continuing that. 

I have decided it would be fun to do a different 30 day challenge each month this year. I figure I can do anything for 30 days and if I like it, it only takes 21 days to build a habit. 

January will be my 30 day yoga challenge. I have always loved yoga and actually started this challenge before (can't remember why I stopped). The videos are less than 20 minutes which makes them an ideal place to start. As Chris Powell says, take it slow when you start out so that you can stay motivated. 

I already started (I have the week off and figured starting early will help if I need a break). I'm on day 4 and it just feels really good to stretch out every morning and take a little bit of time for myself. 

If you haven't tried yoga, I recommend it. It may seem easy (because it isn't a big cardio workout) but it has so many benefits. 

(I found this infographic on pinterest but couldn't find the original creator. Just know the original creator is unfortunately not me!)

Since yoga isn't a big cardio workout, I'm thinking of including something else along with this. Most of my 30 day challenges won't be too long of workouts (squat challenge, splits challenge, plank challenge etc.) So, if you didn't guess, I love Chris Powell and want to try out his month-by-month plan that lasts for the whole year. 

It looks like there are three days a week of weight training (that doesn't look too complicated) and two days a week of cardio. I do highland dance once a week so I really just add one more cardio to my week which I plan on mixing up quite a bit (tone it up workouts, cardio kickboxing, cycling, hula hooping, etc.) I'll keep you updated on what I like and what I don't.

The key to this for me is that it doesn't seem overwhelming. I'm not committing myself to hours of working out intensely everyday forever. I'm taking it 30 days at a time and that keeps me sane!