Fitness Friday My Fitness Journey

So it is the beginning of the New Year, so first off Happy New Year. I hope 2016 is everything you want it to be. 

So as it is a new year I thought I would start off a new part of my blog: FITNESS. I intend for this to be a weekly post mostly to keep myself in check and I think some people might find it interesting. 

Fitness has always been something I have been interesting in, so I thought for todays post I would give you a run down of my fitness journey and where I am today. 

So I have done sport for as long as I can remember but we will start from the age of 11. When I was 11 I was part of a triathlon team, I don't really remember how I got into this but it was pretty serious for a little 11 year old, a lot of people there were older than me and it seemed like everyone was better than me. Although I enjoyed it, it was absolutely exhausting and I was terrified to take part in an actual event as I was so scared I would lose by miles. I think I only lasted about a year and then I moved on. 

Whilst a school, sport was not really pushed on to us. We had p.e and dance lessons every week but no one ever made it super competitive (and this I find out later on life in life is what motivates me). I was part of the school cross country team and even went to some county events but for some reason I was never really inspired by running. I enjoyed it and I was above average at it but for some reason nothing ever motivated me to practice or seriously compete it was just something I was good at. Also when I was at school I was part of the tennis team and the athletics team, both of which I was okay at but neither enjoyed or perused too much.

When I was 12 I joined the local rowing club it was called Project Oarsome and was a course over a year to teach you how to row. This started as just one gym session a week and built up over a year to actually training on the water and at the end of it taking part in a regatta against other new rowers. Once I had finished that I carried on with rowing, I wasn't too sure what to expect but I had made quite a few friends and I wanted to keep in contact with them. Over the next five years I was part of this rowing club which gave me some of the best and worst experiences. It taught me to be disciplined we had training at least four hours a week and at some points I was training for over fourteen hours a week. It was also whilst I was rowing that I became super competitive I found that this is what made me what to train so hard and carry on competing. It was also tough although we were only children there were gruesome trials to make the top squads and due to my petite frame I was always at a disadvantage, I felt like there was nothing I could do but try my best, and I felt like this wasn't good enough some times. I think this also where my competitiveness came from. During this time I won quite a few medals and trophies but whatever I did never felt quite good enough. Also during this time I became very fit, this point in time was probably the fittest I will ever be in my whole life and I wish I had carried on this level of fitness. I was sad when due to work commitments I had to quit but the experiences will stay with me for the rest of my life. 

Now on to when I went to uni, I felt like a change so I joined cheerleading. This was completely different to anything I had ever done before but I am so glad that I did it. Everyone just thinks that it is just pom poms and dance, but it is actually a mixture of dance, gymnastics, jumping and stunting. Doing this made me a lot more coordinated and made me also want to become flexible. Something that not a lot of emphasis was put on at rowing and a lot of emphasis was put on at cheerleading. Despite not being not flexible at all when I started over three years I became very flexible and had nearly mastered the splits by the time I had graduated. 

So I graduated last July and since then I have been all over the place with my fitness, I had a go at doing Blogilates, which was good but went on for too long after a day at work, I tried Kayla Itsnes BBG but I found this extremely intense after a day at work and also there was such a lot of repetition on moves that I felt like it was a strain on my joints. This week I have started doing Lucy Wyndham Read fitness calender, which I have so far enjoyed and will talk more about next week. 

I have also in the sales bought a Russel Hobbs hand blender which I hoping to make some soups with, so if you'd like to see what sort of soups I am making in the Fitness Friday post let me know. Here is a pic after my workout on Monday: beautiful I know ;)

If you got any suggestions of what you want in these posts then please leave a comment. 

See you tomorrow.

Jess

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