Over-indulging over Christmas has led to the inevitable love handles and general doughy appearance of my torso. Much of the exercise from the autumn has been successfully undone, and now it is time to address this issue with much haste.
Tonight was out first night back at Circuit Training. It’s one of the few activities that my wife and I do together, and it’s mostly because it’s in a supervised environment with plenty of witnesses. We tried running together in the past, but that was a stupid idea. Our differing paces and levels of stamina resulted in either uncomfortably cold silence or an inferno of growling and tutting at one another for being too fast/slow/lazy/condescending.
We do occasionally play tennis together, which does go well until I stop letting her win. Then it’s usually my head on the receiving end of the racquet.
Circuit training has worked well for us though. We tend to be on our best behaviour, and actually encourage one another. The variety of exercises allow us to both work on our individual strengths and weaknesses, whilst there are also good cardio stations for us to get the blood pumping and flood ourselves with endorphins. We get home, both hungry, but both buzzing. We then spend a good 15 minutes complaining about the exercises that we enjoyed the least, although we inevitably feel the benefit in the following days.
We started attending this particular class in October, and during our festive break we both genuinely missed it. I felt particularly sedentary, despite walking a good 18,000 steps most days we were away thanks to the dog’s insatiable need to walk as far as possible, especially when there are new fields and smells to explore. But this wasn’t the same as getting a proper hardcore beasting from our PT, who has an uncanny ability to exhaust you halfway through a session and still keep you going all the way through, giving more than you thought you had week after week.
I wear my Apple Watch every day. Closing my rings has become an essential part of every single day since I got it, and it’s made a massive change to my lifestyle. I’m sure I will write a more comprehensive blog about it later on, but for now I’ll keep it brief. It tracks my activity, nudges me to keep moving and to walk around often, and even lets me share and compare my progress with others. Currently I only share with my younger brother who also uses an Apple Watch, although his approach is far from the activity nutcase that I have become.
I don’t count calories really, but I do like to make sure I’m at least burning off all that I consume. This wasn’t the case over Christmas, but luckily Thursdays like this are back, and I can get back in the swing of things and burn off all of the pastries and sweet treats that I couldn’t resist over the past 3 weeks. As you can see from the screenshots, I’ve burnt a fair amount of calories today, but doing the exercise wasn’t the hard part for me. Oh no. Now comes the real challenge – resisting the dozen mince pies that my wife baked earlier in the week!