aging imperfectly

Friday, April 23, 2021

My Fitness Journey 2020-2021

There's one thing that I do daily, no matter what. I work out! With the trying times of whatever this is now, working out has become a sort of catharsis, a therapy if you will.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels

I've been working my physical fitness and I've done this primarily with three apps. I'll do fully detailed reviews of each platform and method eventually but this post will serve as a brief summary.

Last year, I started daily workouts in August.

It wasn't always this way! After the pandemic shut most things down, it wasn't safe for me to go to work anymore and I felt as frustrated as you did.

Then what happened? Amidst all the uncertainty with the pandemic, I'd lost the strength gains and endurance that I'd built up working the very physical job I had at the grocery store last year.

It felt as if I became weaker pretty quickly and I can definitely attribute some of that to age. Eeeek. However, it doesn't have to be that way and I decided I'd work out daily to see what would happen.

It was so hard at first! Some days I could only walk briskly for about 10 minutes, never mind doing anything substantial with weight training or flexibility.

Every day built onto the previous day's work, though, and that was encouraging. I wasn't too hard on myself but I knew that I would plateau quickly so I'd have to work on a more formal plan of action.

I wasn't really monitoring what I was eating and I know that improving your fitness levels can include modifying your food intake as well as energy output. What did I do?

At first I started with Walk at Home, Leslie Sansone's app.

She's famous for encouraging many people to start walking in the privacy of their own homes.

For over 30 years, she's been energetic and offers a lot of ways to walk with her now substantial workout library. It's not boring and I find myself looking forward to her energy and the variety that you can do with walking and using resistance bands.

However, this wasn't enough on its own to get me out of a plateau.

If you peruse YouTube or Instagram, it's likely that you've seen ads for Noom. This is what WebMD says about it:

Noom's Healthy Weight Program is a comprehensive wellness plan, with food, exercise, and mental health aspects built in. The idea is to change your behaviors so that you not only take off the weight, but maintain the weight loss long-term.

Sounds good, right? In theory, yes. This post isn't going to be a detailed review of Noom YET. In summary, it didn't work out for me. :/

There are some pros to it for sure, but the cons for me outweighed the slight progress that I had made with the app. It stoked the fires of some unhealthy behaviors in me and that's why I can't recommend it for just everyone.

It's also frustrating because as of March 2021, they hadn't updated their app to reflect the reality of the pandemic. Examples including all of the healthy choices that you could make at work, assuming that you had a regular 9-5 job in an office that was actually open.

However, I CAN and tell you about my success so far with P.volve!! What is P.volve? From their website:

Functional movement is our blueprint.

Unlike traditional fitness, we help you learn how to move your body the way it was designed to move.

How do we do it? We combine dynamic joint movement with patented resistance-based equipment to activate and strengthen each and every muscle. That means rotating and moving the body in every direction—sometimes, in unfamiliar ways—to support moving more functionally throughout the day.

And in the process, you’ll know your body better so you can increase the stability, mobility and balance needed to achieve a strong, sculpted physique.

P.volve also offers an incredibly generous discount to students, educators, and health care professionals. That's how I got an amazing discount on the Transformation Kit.

It's been almost 3 months since I've been doing p.volve and I do at least 3 workouts per week, ideally going for 4-5. That's been hard because of all of my commitments, especially those that are distance learning related, for the kids.

Here's me working out to one of the latest workouts. It is HARD and I can't believe I filmed this and have it out there for the whole world to see. I was amazed that I was actually able to DO the fire hydrants with the p.ball because my balance a few weeks ago was a little iffy. YAY!

I really like all the trainers as they help you to be motivated and I never feel patronized or talked down to in any way. That's the problem with some exercise "gurus" and methods, and I'm not naming any names. Shame should never be a component of any exercise program or ANY program for that matter.

I also appreciate the diversity of the trainers because fitness should be inclusive. If you have a body, you can participate in fitness. The term I prefer is "deconditioned individual" instead of "out of shape". We're all unique and then the challenge of aging imperfectly (see what I did there?) means that you have to adjust your regimen accordingly.

Here's a recent pic of me in one of my haphazard workout outfits, taken precariously as I balanced on the steps, hoping not to fall backwards. :P