Throughout the last school year, I continually paid less and less attention to my physical fitness and instead poured all my focus into my school work. I lost my drive to work out and became complacent with calling walking the campus my daily exercise.
However, when I took core fitness over the summer with Coach Lori Rembe and Coach Kareen Young, I was exposed to a whole new level of self-care and physical health. The course focused on speed and stamina training, core building, good eating habits and flexibility improvement.
Every time we went out to the track to run a mile, I pushed myself to my limits, explaining my largely positive results. Unfortunately, due to this sudden burst of running so frequently, I developed shin splints, a leg injury that makes running difficult. Now that I’ve had time to recover, however, I can see the difference when exercising.
Instead of walking on a treadmill for 20 minutes once a week while watching Netflix as my only workout, I now do interval training on my treadmill and run my mile long neighborhood — and that’s just my warmup.
This course introduced me to numerous core exercises I can do at home with no equipment. I noticed myself developing the beginning of stronger abs after a mere three weeks of core fitness. Now, I can ensure those abs fully come through and stay strong by introducing the workouts I learned in class into my everyday routine.
A large amount of time was spent watching documentaries that encouraged a healthier lifestyle through many different methods. Before this course, I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted without thinking of the long term effects on my body. I now (am trying to) cut out sugar, soda and fast food (baby steps). In addition to this, the course also inspired me to try new fruits, vegetables and superfoods and keep count of my daily caloric intake.
One of the largest components of the class was flexibility training. I have tried different “easy ways to touch your toes in three months” and other clickbait, easy-way-out websites to increase my flexibility. I’ve never been able to touch my toes, and still lacked the ability in the beginning of the course. However, each day we stretched, I felt the change in everything from my posture to my stride. By the end of the course, I earned the achievement of being able to say I could reach my toes with ease, and could additionally fully enter the poses I’d learned during the class.
However, not only does yoga improve flexibility, but it also helps focus a distracted mental state. I remember that the first day we did yoga, I walked into class after a family argument and with stress from summer assignments. I left class with a relaxed clear mind. Yoga helps if you’re stressed on a school night and can’t sleep, working to melt that anxiety away and clear a path for sweet dreams and A’s.
While you don’t need to take the class to experience your own 2018 physical revolution, by utilizing the information and workouts the class provides, you can transform your body to improve how you experience everyday life — I know the change I went through did so for me.
