My Fitness Challenge

It’s been almost 1400 days (I know, that sounds like forever!) since I started my fitness challenge – even if, at the time, I had no idea it was a challenge.

Reflecting on the past…

I all started when a colleague told me he wanted to buy some weights. I decided to tag along and ended up grabbing a box for myself. I hauled the damn thing home on the train all the way from Strathpine. I clearly remember the box almost falling to pieces as I lugged it upstairs to my old unit in Morningside. I think I just managed to get it inside before the cardboard gave way and the weight plates fell to the ground – missing my feet by inches. Little did I know that an innocent box of weights would turn into a quest to challenge myself about the way I viewed physical activity, the way I looked and the way others perceived me.

In my class at school I was always the token lanky nerd – I hated sport, faked sickness & death (true story!) to get out of it and spent most of my free time on the computer playing games or designing websites like this one (heh). At home, my father and brother often jokingly referred to me as a “lead duck” – to this day I still have no clue what that means, but I think at the time I viewed it as a negative thing (and up until just then I’d forgotten about it, to be honest).

So why did the lead duck turn a box of weights into so much more? I guess I decided to stick to it to see what would happen. At first, absolutely nothing. For 6 weeks. I think I almost gave up at one stage – the weights probably gathered more mass in ‘dust’ than my arms did from using them. But slowly, I saw results. I decided to stick with it, sought motivation from others and eventually upgraded my simple weight set to a cheap home gym I bought from eBay.

Progress to date…

Since then, I’ve been though several home gym stations (all purchased from eBay – I think I’m up to my 4th one now, but it’s by far the best & most versatile to date) and each one has been an ‘upgrade’ from the last – changing exercises as I went along, to keep things challenging for the body. I guess some of my motivation came from my stereotype – a tall lanky nerd who didn’t play sport. I wanted to change that – not because I had a big problem with it, but because I wanted to see if I could do it. And so far, things are going well.

I guess with any quest or challenge, it’s not always clear to see how it’s going until you stop and look at the numbers …and being a typical Virgo has certainly helped in that respect – I’ve been keeping most of the gym records over the last few years. I used to struggle doing  25 sit-ups, but 3 years on I’m doing 250 of them. The same increases can be seen in my fitness  journal for bicep curls, pull-downs and a plethora of other free-weight exercises.

But it really hit me when I looked back at some photos. A few months back, I looked at a photo that I had taken of myself in 2007 – I was shocked! Did I really look like that? All skin & bones? I guess the camera never lies. Wow… no wonder my bathroom BMI scale suggested I was underweight! I honestly didn’t realise the progress I’d made until I compared the two images side by side – one from 2007 and one from 2009 (provided below).

Proving yourself wrong

A personal challenge is saying to yourself “I bet you can’t do so-and-so…”, followed by the subconscious saying “Hah whatever… betcha I can!!” – and then setting out and doing it. Proving that initial ‘negative’ thought wrong and proving you CAN do it. Personally, I reckon my challenge to date has been quite successful. I have proved to myself that I can actually ‘do’ sport, that I can get puffed and that I can sweat. Yes – I can grow out of the ‘boney nerd’ box that I was often put into. Again, it wasn’t about proving others wrong, it was primarily about proving myself wrong.

Stepping outside your comfort zone

My challenge has helped me grow – both physically and mentally. I went out on a limb, tried something and stuck to it. I did something that was outside of my comfort zone (like going quadbiking for the first time on a work team-building weekend in New Zealand last year) and it had positive results. It’s changed the way I look at things and torn down a few mental barriers I’ve had inside. Mentally, it’s proved to me that if I set my mind to something, I can achieve it. Or at least, help me learn a few lessons from it so that I can improve next time or learn from my mistakes.

These days, I think that I am more willing to give things a try and see how they turn out… and I think that’s had a positive “flow-on effect” into many other areas of my life – such as a huge improvement in my level of trust when it comes to relationships, the ability to be a little riskier in running my business (such as taking a punt and spending money on advertising and the like) and a general improvement in how I view life.

Where to from here?

…which leaves me pondering the future. Where to from here? What do I want to do next? Well first things first – I thoroughly enjoy challenging myself with bodybuilding and I don’t think I will change that anytime soon – believe it or not it calms me. It allows me to shut out all of the crap and focus on the task at hand. It’s mentally draining – not to mention physically (of course). But the feeling of accomplishment and those endorphins afterwards just put all the negatives to shame.

Looking ahead into the crystal ball for the next few years, I know that I certainly don’t want to become some massive dude with arms like tree trunks – I just want to be toned and continue to enjoy being fit. After all, exercise is good for you. It promotes a healthy lifestyle and a desire to look after your body (hence my switch to natural / organic products for skin and haircare last year – but more on that topic another time).

One thing I know for certain is that I want to branch out into other areas of fitness – perhaps swimming or jogging. I’ve even thought of hitting the text books and doing a TAFE course or part time degree in fitness or personal training – mainly so that I understand more about the “behind the scenes” …what goes on when you exercise? How can you get the best gains? How can I improve my diet? …and so forth.

For the past few weeks I’ve been inspired by my friend Joel Annesley’s range of challenges that he sets himself (mind you they’ve got nothing to do with fitness – lifestyle and comfort zone yes, but not fitness). With expansion into other activities in mind, I’ve thought long and hard about a challenge that I could set myself… and I think I’m going to set myself a jogging challenge.

I haven’t worked it all out as yet – but I think it’ll have something to do with jogging around the local park and setting myself time-based challenges. Granted you probably think jogging is easy – but when you consider someone like me who, literally & honestly, hasn’t run in about 5 years (no lie!), it may well actually be a challenge for me to move at anything other than a “brisk walking pace” without collapsing into a heap, falling over or giving up very easily. More on this upcoming challenge at another time…

For now though, I hope I’ve sufficiently convinced you to give something new a try. Prove yourself wrong and break out of that stereotypical mould that you may be cast into. Challenge yourself. Step outside your comfort zone… you can do it if you set your mind to it! Trust me!

Until next time – best of luck & happy gains