Motivation Monday | Together We Fitness

*I have no idea whether ‘Motivation Monday’ will become a weekly/fortnight thing or a one time thing, but I couldn’t resist making that alliteration.*

Malaysia has been very hard on my health in the past weeks (weather, school, activities, living on my own… who knows why) and thus one of the things I started to do was to be more conscious of my fitness levels and on how to stay fit. In almost 21 years, I have never been focused on fitness, or the importance of sports/working out for instance, until now.

A lot of my friends, local and abroad, go to the gym regularly and although I am lucky to have access to a free gym at school (or if it’s not good enough, I can even go to the paid one next to my apartment) I’ve never been interested in doing so. I am still not interested, but this is mainly because I am always shy when it comes to starting something new and foreign to me, and also because I do tend to be intimidated by the various machinery that I wouldn’t know how to handle. However, lately, my room has become my little gym place. I even bought a yoga/fitness mat!

Among those gym friends, the majority of them go to the gym to work on their physique and their goal is to reach their preferred ‘ideal’ body or lose weight. On the other hand, I am definitely not into a ‘perfect’ body; I don’t mind the little pouches of fat hanging onto me. What drives me into exercising is the endurance I can build. Basically, I don’t care if I don’t look strong, but I want to be strong, so that when that zombie apocalypse comes, I won’t be out of breath in only 1 minute of running.

Nevertheless, I’m in no way against taking care of your appearance via fitness. In fact, the sources and goals of our motivation are a personal thing and none is less superior than any other. Frankly, it’s all about feeling good about yourself and having that drive to wake up every morning to engage in long-term-goal-oriented activities.

Okay, so here’s my workout routine: it’s very simple and some of you might have heard of it; it’s the 7-minute daily workout!

This only takes 7-9 minutes of my time and basically within 7 minutes I have 13 workout exercises to do, guided by audio. I do the ‘Classic Workout’ every morning: 30 secs for each exercise with 10 secs break in-between. It’s really quick and useful if you are a busy person or simply wants to stay fit without aiming for any dramatic physical changes.

This also made me create a morning routine, one that I would look forward too (although those 7 minutes are quite hellish – don’t underestimate the exercises like my significant other) because it would kickstart my day into productivity/happiness mode. Every morning (including weekends) I practically wake up at around the same time (8:00-9:00 a.m.), then go on to brushing my teeth, then doing the workout, then going for a shower and finally starting my ‘real’ day with breakfast, just in time before going to school/getting work done.

Why not give it a try? In addition, since the app could sync with Google Fit, I decided to download Google Fit. I don’t use it as much because I don’t do sports, but I do walk a lot, therefore I started to keep track of that too. Besides, their colours are pretty and aesthetics are always a motivation for me:

From the moment I started this simple yet motivational fitness lifestyle, I kind of dragged my boyfriend into it also, and there was something particular that happened today that pushed me to write this blog post today.

During our weekly club meeting this evening, he randomly pulled me aside to show me his Google Fit, because he was proud that he had walked for 1h 4mins and that he had been keeping up with the 7-minute workout (today is his 2nd day only, and the chances of quitting are greater at the start I believe). So I opened my Google Fit and at that time I had walked for 1h 6mins, thus I started teasing him like: ‘Ha, I walked 2 minutes more than you!’ Then, his workout showed ’10 minutes’ while mine showed ‘8 minutes’, so I was like: ‘I workout faster too!’ Basically we just ended up giggling, and I was really glad of that little private inside-joke moment we had in the middle of a Performing Arts session, which occurred simply because we were keeping track of our physical fitness together.

I found it cute and it reminded me of how little mundane things can make a lot of difference: routine can be a good thing when shared, in terms of improving relationships with the people around you, and when it leads you towards your goals (either long-term, like having an ideal body, or short-term, like being able to wake up every morning). Routine can be motivating too.

I hope that this post will help some of you in finding motivation in your everyday life. 🙂

Until next time,

An Evil Nymph.