SHARING MY NEW HEALTH CHALLENGE

At the start of 2022, I knew I wasn’t feeling my best however I didn’t want to set an unrealistic health goal that I wasn’t going to be able to stick to. Fast forward about two weeks to the start of a new school semester and my professor introduced a “lifestyle change project” where we could do really anything to better ourselves and write a report on it.

First of all, I want to say to any other university students out there potentially reading this, I advise you to look and see if you can find any classes like this at your University. This is my last semester and I’m honestly wishing that I had taken this class sooner. I’ve always made relatively healthy decisions however this class really helps me understand WHY it is a good idea to make healthy choices, and I think I will have an easier time sticking to my goals now because of it.

So what is my project?

Movement.

For those of you that are new around here, I was a competitive swimmer for 10 years. I was usually in the pool 6 days a week for multiple hours at a time. I didn’t have to think about exercise because it was so built into my life. After I graduated high school and gave up swimming I had to start really thinking about living an active lifestyle. I’ve challenged myself to work out every day for a month. I’ve gone through phases where I wanted to run a certain number of times a week, or complete a certain number of kilometres a month. But this time, I wanted to keep it simple.

The main purpose of having my goal be movement-based was so that I could have fun with it. I wanted the flexibility to be able to go for a really good run one day that was short and sweet to close my rings, but also have the option of having a rest day where maybe I just do a lot of stretching.

I set my numbers high enough that I had to actually put in effort to accomplish them, without being so high that I would lose motivation. I have found that by setting goals that are decently attainable (for me, everyone is going to look different) that I’m actually pushing myself to go above and beyond on a regular basis.

A large part of regular workouts for me is just getting started. Having a goal that pushes me to get started on a daily basis has helped me tremendously. I already am feeling more energized, stronger and overall just really excited.

Currently, the majority of my workouts have been walking/running and whole body at-home workouts that I find on youtube (I personally love MadFit) but I also want to have a lot of fun with this going forward. I think the occasional spin class or yoga class would be fun and I also want to start going back to the pool occasionally.

I have already seen so many great benefits from holding myself to this goal and I’m excited to see how I feel going forward. I’ll do some occasional updates on here, let me know if this is something you would like to see on a more regular basis though.

I would love to hear what self-development project you are working on currently, as always let me know in the comments! And with that…

XO Cassidy Hannah