Having an Awesome August
What I’ve Accomplished Since the Middle of July
Good morning Medium followers! I apologize for my absence lately, things have been kind of busy in my life. My full-time job has been busy, I’ve been busy with paid writing, and life in general has been busy. I’ve also recently made some changes that have positively affected my health.
Started working on increasing my step goal.
I’ve worn a Garmin step counter/health monitor for a few years now, and I love it. I’ve used it to help me improve my fitness and get in better health overall, and it has helped. One of the things it does is that it lets me know when I need to get up and move a bit. This is great, because my job is very sedentary, although it’s not always convenient. Recently though, I’ve started working more religiously on getting more steps in. My record in the past few weeks has been 11,982 steps which I hit last Sunday. The graphic below shows my steps for last Monday through Friday:
Finished my Core de Force/Yoga Hybrid
After I finished the Three Week Yoga Retreat workout, I decided to do a hybrid of workouts from Core de Force and various yoga workouts that Beachbody has — they have a whole bunch of different ones in their Beachbody Yoga Studio that’s available to Beachbody on Demand subscribers. I increased my flexibility and improved my balance even more doing this, but I think now my body is getting too used to yoga. As a result, I’ve decided to try a workout that incorporates more high-intensity interval training. I’m starting Turbofire on Monday, that should be interesting.
How I’ve been getting more steps in despite doing a lot of sedentary work
I started figuring out a few different ways to get in more steps:
My workouts
Some of my workouts — mostly the Core de Force workouts, which are more cardio-based, require me to take more steps. I also started working in some indoor walking workouts from YouTube. My favorites are Leslie Sansone workouts, although she can be a bit too perky for me sometimes, and Jessica Smith’s walking workouts. I really enjoy all her workouts, not just the walking ones. She gives a lot of good tips, and she has a dog named Peanut that you’ll sometimes see laying off to the side, or walking around a bit during the workouts. You can check her out here:
Walking in place during downtimes at work
When work is slow, I’ll sometimes stand up and walk in place for a few minutes — until I get a call, or until I just get tired of it. One day we were so slow I was just about able to reach my step goal doing this (well, I’d also gotten in quite a few steps during my walking workout that morning.)
Walking around my furniture during commercial breaks while watching TV.
I like to watch TV at night for a few hours before going to bed. One night I decided to start walking around my sectional couch and coffee table during commercial breaks to see if that wouldn’t help me get in more steps. I found that it did — I was able to get in about 250 steps during a commercial break that’s approximately 5 minutes. When I told my husband I’d started doing this, he suggested also start walking around the prep island in our kitchen and our kitchen table. I did this and was able to increase the number of steps I took.
The Results I’ve seen from taking more steps
The biggest effect I’ve seen is that my thighs are sore a lot more — probably because I’m working my muscles more. I also notice I’m much more alert — this makes sense, especially since walking has a brain-boosting effect, as I learned in this YouTube video:
In the future, I’m looking forward to seeing other benefits from walking.
Been working on improving my memoir.
I started writing what I first thought would be a memoir earlier this year. After checking out a guide for outlining a non-fiction book, though, I’m now wondering if it wouldn’t work better as more of a self-help type book. I’ve been working through an outline that a colleague sent to me and figure out what would be best to do with this book or memoir, or whether I should publish it at all.
Other than that, I’ve been working on the things I normally work on — my house, working at my full-time job, and doing some paid writing when I can. My full-time job and the paid writing have slowed down somewhat, I guess because it was the middle of the summer and a lot of people where on vacation. Now that people are starting to come back from vacation and school is getting back in session in some places, like here in North Carolina, those things are both starting to pick up.
