Good morning and welcome to Friday. Today marks the end of the fourth week of our Spring Forward to Action challenge. Wow, four weeks went by quick. I started off this fitness challenge with the idea of building up endurance. My initial goal was to overcome the lethargy and weakness brought on by a prolonged recovery period after my surgery.
Stamina Makes All the Difference
When it comes to choosing a fitness plan and implementing one, stamina makes all the difference. It’s hard to maintain a workout program if you flag after just ten minutes of walking. The only way to build stamina is to work out regularly and to build yourself up from a ten minute walk to a twenty minute walk to a thirty and so forth and so on.
Our stamina is what lets us push forward even when we’re tired. Our stamina lets us achieve our strength training on the same day we did our cardiovascular workout. Our stamina is what gets us through the day, juggling our responsibilities and coping with the increased stress that comes from being a parent, a writer, a teacher and more.
This Challenge
For me, this challenge was very successful. I found it very hard – in the beginning – to even maintain my enthusiasm for it. I’d wake up in the morning, I’d come up with a dozen different excuses as to why it would be ‘okay’ to skip my workout. Whether the excuse was that I had a lot of work to do or I was going to be substitute teaching or even better – I overslept, I kept coming up with them.
Coming up with the excuses wasn’t the hard part – overcoming those excuses — that was the hard part. I overcame them by getting on the treadmill whether I wanted to or not. I overcame them by pressing forward with a strength-training workout even when my muscles were fatigued. I overcame these excuses by reminding myself how much better I would feel if I just did the workout.
After that first two weeks, those excuses were fewer and farther between. It took less convincing for me to proceed with my workout and I didn’t have such a hard time overcoming those excuses – mostly because I wasn’t coming up with them anymore. I was feeling better, I was feeling stronger and I had my stamina back.
For me, this challenge was a success. How was it for you?