During the lockdown period, I gained a lot of weight and was not fit at all. Whenever I used to go to play football after the lockdown ended I just wasn’t able to as my fitness levels were not up to the mark or not as they were prior to lockdown. Hence I decided to join a gym to work on my fitness and also to lose weight. I joined the gym from the start of February 2021. I work on my overall body by working on different muscle groups each day and repeating them in cycles.
LO1: My gym trainer with whom I am training right now, who is also my supervisor, has been my trainer previously and he knows my strengths and weaknesses more than I know. But still, before starting gym I did identify my strengths and weaknesses, for example, I knew that my core was very weak and I didn’t have any core strength which was also resulting in a poor football performance as to shoot the ball with the power you need good core strength. Hence my core strength was something that I had to work upon. However, I still had good strength with my legs and they were something that I can work on later on because they were not that important on the initial stage. This is how I identified my strengths and weaknesses.
I felt motivated after I identified my strengths and weaknesses as I know exactly which muscle groups I have to work upon first. It is important to know your strengths and weaknesses as it personally helped me to create a more efficient plan with my gym trainer, a plan which focuses more on my weaknesses.
LO2: The challenging part for me in this experience was that I needed a lot of motivation to keep going to the gym every day for an hour, also to lose weight I was given a particular diet that was very difficult to maintain and I also had to study everyday, so this made my daily routine very busy and hard. I overcame this challenge by making a proper timetable for myself, writing each and everything that I had to do on that particular day, and organizing them as per my convenience. Currently, I am able to do everything very smoothly, and yes I still get tired but I manage to complete everything. I developed a new skill while taking this challenge which was time management, I became good at it and still am improving which is helping me in general as well.
LO3: I organized myself by making a plan for a whole week. I had 6 days in a week in which I would go to the gym. On Sundays, I decided to take a rest so that my body can recover and I can again carry on with my workout the next day.
I made a plan, each day I would train different muscle groups. For example, legs, chest, shoulders, triceps, and biceps, back, and cardio(core). I divided 6 days into 6 different body parts. This is how I organized myself. For this particular activity initiating was more difficult compared to planning, as planning required lesser time compared to initiating. There would be days when I felt so tiring but still, I was not giving up and continuing to go to the gym. Whereas planning doesn’t require that much hard work. I didn’t learn any new skills while I was planning and initiating this activity but I did improve upon the existing skills that I know such as time management and communicating. As I had to also keep up with all the things happening in school, time management for me was very crucial here. And communication with my gym trainer so that a common time is decided where both of us can meet and he can supervise me. In the future, planning and initiating will be much easier as I now have a little bit of experience and I know what went wrong in the planning and I learned how these things cannot be repeated. Hence planning and initiating will be much easier in the future.
LO4: Going to the gym and doing workouts every day was very tiring and needed a lot of commitment and a strong will to complete this experience. The commitment was the main thing here as there were days where I just felt like I’m getting no results and I should just quit but then being committed and doing these workouts every day was definitely going to give me results. So I kept ongoing. It is generally easy for me to show commitment and perseverance but in this particular activity it was too tiring for me to show constant commitment, but I knew that in the long run I am definitely going to get results and minor results were already visible.
I developed the learner profile ‘balanced’ while doing this activity as I had to balance my life with eating healthy, working out every day without missing out on my studies. This activity also benefited others as my family when they saw the results that I was getting in just 15 days made them also follow the same diet that I follow and they also go for workouts. Currently, I can’t talk about my success or failure as I still have a lot of exercises to do but I can say that at least I have been reaching closer to my goal and may even achieve it in some short period of time. This activity did bring a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment as I had started seeing good results from the diet that I was maintaining and my regular workout. I even started to build good strength and lifted even more weight compared to when I started gymming. Commitment and perseverance was the main learning from this activity and this learning will be used throughout my life as there will be situations where I have to just keep going and show commitment and perseverance.
EVIDENCE:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bHxMupwmWdqdH-54fLriS3VYIyRV7BFm/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G0UsNXUK6KbPKJt0SM6xM4IB28BRMuII/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wmj1NQ1YATsU3mba9uZuBtao4awaqdKa/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d85tDXBAeE5HIYTTlKpMefykb6gIsE5x/view?usp=sharing