working out and your life

I've been really bad about posting my workouts lately, but trust me, i'm doing them! just not being as religious about uploading the photos of my journal. That being said, I'd like to talk about how you fit working out into your life. I assume that by now you realize that you go through cycles in your life and that one thing doesn't work for you all the time. My exercise history is proof of that. For Example; when I was a child, I was really active. I loved running around the neighborhood making up fanciful games, climbing trees, and playing basketball and baseball with my brother. I swam whenever I had the opportunity, without reservations about wearing a bathing suit or whether I had remembered to put on sunscreen. Formally, I danced and was in a baton troupe. Essentially, I was very, very active until I hit my teens.

When I was 12 I quit dance in favor of trying soccer. The downside to soccer is that recreational youth soccer is only 4 and a half months of the year. Without ballet to keep me active the rest of the year and with puberty in full-force I became very sedentary. For a while, my metabolism kept me very skinny, but, as every woman knows, somewhere in your teens your metabolism SLOWS DOWN! I still had (and have) a fast metabolism, but I was out of shape. Even with P.E. classes, I didn't have the physical fitness level that I enjoy now. My junior year I started to get a bit heavier - enough so my mother noticed, although I'm pretty sure that she was more worried about my fitness level than my waistline.

The turning point for me was the summer after my Junior year of high school. That summer my family went to Hawaii. We walked a lot, climbed stairs to the fourth floor (where our condo was) every day, multiple times a day, we swam all the time, and I tried surfing. Over the course of two weeks, I noticed that my shorts started to fit better and that all of a sudden I liked the shape of my thighs. They were slimmer and toned, as opposed to mostly fat and heading towards chunky. (I'm one of those body types that puts weight on mostly around the hips and thighs, in case you couldn't tell!).

who WOULDN'T want to walk here?

When we came back from that vacation I was motivated by the changes in my body. My mom and I discussed what kind of physical activity I might do regularly if I had it available. I decided that I would probably do a pilates video so we bought a couple Denise Austin pilates workouts. (Pilates for Every Body and Power Yoga Plus for those of you who want to know). I started doing the Pilates for Every body every day. I wouldn't always do the whole video, but I did some part of it every day. Then, as I progressed through my senior year, I started adding videos to my collection and I would mix it up. I did a lot of Denise Austin videos because they were effective for me at that point in my life and because I was working out at home (and I'm a self-motivating type) I would actually do them.

some of my video library:

I kept up with the video trend (using the videos above in varying combinations) throughout my undergraduate years. My sophomore year of college I took up jump roping regularly. When I say I took it up, I mean I would turn on a movie (usually one that was at least 2 hours long) and jump rope for the ENTIRE DURATION of the movie. I would start with the opening credits and not stop until the closing credits were running. To this day I am not sure how I managed that, but I was in the BEST cardio shape of my life at that point! (I also weighed all of 102 lbs).

The winter of 2006 I started snowboarding on weekends. It's a GREAT workout and really fun to be out in the great outdoors, flying down a mountain and feeling your legs burn. And then I had a snowboarding accident that quickly ended that. (another snowboarder ran into me when I was sitting off the run and his board cut into my lower back/right hip about an inch from my spine... ).

As soon as I healed I started training in Martial arts. Martial Arts is another great place to get a really well balanced workout. I loved the art, but only made it through my yellow belt before I moved to Boston for Grad school. One note here, the training I was doing there was so intense and so calorie intensive that it would make me incredibly hungry for the entire week (I wasn't hungry after the workout, but the next day I was a bottomless pit) and I gained nearly 15 lbs that summer - all muscle.

The next stop in my workout evolution was Boston. I moved 3,000 miles away from everything (and everyone) I knew and loved. I was a wreck. One of the few things I could count on to keep me out of the all-encompassing depression of my homesickness was the endorphins from my workouts. I was nervous about doing them in my new home, though. I was living in a 3rd floor walk up with 3 other people that I didn't know. Thankfully, my days usually started after everyone else's did, so I was able to do my home workouts - which morphed several times while I was going through my masters degree. First I would just use my videos that I had brought with me. THEN I discovered www.exercisetv.tv. This website has a whole store of workout videos of all types and lengths that you can stream online. for the first year and a half of my masters degree (2008-09) this website was my new best friend. The downside was that between walking everywhere (I didn't have a car while I was in boston), the workouts, and the new city I was getting sick a LOT. And when you're working on a master's degree in VOICE, having many, many colds really makes it hard to progress.

So my workout practices changed again. I started doing yoga almost exclusively while adding some pleasure walks to my daily, very necessary, walks. I stopped getting sick as often and started feeling a lot less stressed and a lot more open to the world around me. Which you can read more about in this post: http://buildingsexy.blogspot.com/2011/01/loving-yourself.html

But then, as I moved into that groove, I moved back to California. My parents, being the awesome people they are with lots of furloughed time, flew to boston, rented a car, packed me up and we started the first real road trip of my life. Keeping up the yoga on the road was surprisingly easy. I'd just wake up a little earlier than everyone else and do some yoga on the floor of the hotel rooms. So the trip itself wasn't total ruin for my routine, it just changed where I did it. Then I got home. while settling back into life in California - for good this time - My daily routine went *splat*. I was transitioning from living in boston to living in california again AND I was transitioning from living with roommates or my parents to taking the step of living with my fiancé. In a small house. With lots of stuff. Doing yoga in a room with lots of stuff is really hard to do! So I did some yoga, but I tended to go back to my videos on exercisetv. Sometimes.

Sometimes I would do workouts from womenshealthmag.com. Those are great too, but it was still only sometimes. I was also playing and refereeing soccer at the time, so I was getting some exercise there, but that was all weekends and my week days weren't as proactive on the workout front. I became a 'weekend warrior.' Uh oh.

This is when Ethan (the fiancé) sent me the link to bodyrock.tv. As I watched Zuzana go through her routine, my eyes kind of glazed over and I remember thinking, "there's no way I could do that." So I didn't. I continued with my lackadaisical workout schedule and counted floorsets at work as a workout. Finally I got up the nerve to try one of Zuzana's workouts. and it was fun! I did another workout the next day. And the next. I started recording my workouts in my little journal and I kept doing the bodyrock workouts on a nearly daily basis until I sprained my ankle. Then I discovered that I could create my own Zuzana style workouts that took into account my injury. I discovered that creating my own workouts was fun and decided to keep doing it.

I do even more research for exercising now than I ever have. It's interesting and I learn so much on a daily basis about the different ways to approach fitness. There are so many choices that there WILL be one that works for you.

Have you already figured out what that is? What it was when you were younger? What's your workout evolution? Do you keep a workout journal? How often do you workout? Those are all questions for YOU!