Second Step Done in Steps to Change

As of yesterday, I am done with the second set of my three-week focus periods. I'm grouping those into bunches of three as well, which means that this is my final push on my first theme.

To remind all of you out there in readerland, it was: habits.

Habits can be hard to establish, and studies have shown that exercise is a particularly difficult habit to establish. It normally takes, what, thirty days or so to turn an action into a habit? With exercise, if I'm remember correctly, it can take twice that.

The first three weeks were just about doing something, anything. How hard it was didn't really matter, because the goal was just to do something. It wasn't about getting in shape yet, or losing weight, or any of that. It was laying the foundation.

There past three weeks were to push myself in what I was doing while keeping a similar number of exercises done. That has been successful; none of my workouts these past few weeks were phoned in, though not all of them wore me out equally well.

I've been doing Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred (level one thus far) and putting in time on my exercise bike, working out 3-4 times a week. Doing one with rest days in between rarely leaves me sore, but I've found that doing one and then the other will. (Right now, I'm not sure how to best gauge my progress or if I'm working out hard enough, so being sore the next day is my metric).

I think, for the rest of this initial 9 weeks, I'm going to double down hard on the 30 Day Shred (except for today - I am tracking my fitness progress by measuring my ability to do a couple of exercises, so I always start a three-week period doing it). From what I hear, you're supposed to do the 30 Day Shred every day. While that's always seemed a bit crazy to me, I also want to give it a shot for this last three-week period.

Now, for me, I know it won't actually be every day - if I'm too weak from the previous day, I won't do it, or will modify it (weak muscles means a much better chance of an injury), but I am interested to see what I am capable of and how my body responds. I will probably regret this on day 2, but putting it here gives me a much better shot at doing it more.

Thus far, I do feel like I am making progress. Not a lot, not yet, but this first period was all supposed to be setup and foundation anyhow. The next two 9-week intervals will be much more focused, though as of yet, I am not sure on what. Time will tell!