The Adventures Of A Yo-Yo Gym Attendee
Not that I’m old by any means but when I was younger I never had to worry about my weight. I always thought I looked good and wore what I wanted to wear while I ate massive amounts of chips, chocolate bars, and soda as a staple food item.
I basically worked all day and danced all night. I was always on the go and always felt really good about myself.
Then my nights of going out and dancing slowed down to one night a year from seven nights a week. I eventually moved from a very physically demanding job to a less physical – sitting behind a desk – job that I still enjoyed my junk food at.
Time went on and before I knew what was happening I couldn’t fit in to my favorite pair of jeans and I could no longer button up my knee length sweater. In fact, I couldn’t even wrap it around me, it was just too small.
So I started going to the gym. The first year I melted off the gained weight quickly and built up some muscle. I looked and felt better than I had before I even gained the weight in the first place. So once I was happy with my body and my gym membership ran out I put working out on the back-burner and grabbed my bag of chips.
Quickly, I went past the not being able to zip up the pants era and entered the – I can’t get the pants past my thigh – era. So I found a different gym.
I remember the first time I went to that gym and stepped on the scale and truthfully thought to myself that the scale must be broken. I worked out like I had never worked out before. I lost the weight and ended my gym routine again.
Very quickly I was in the – I’m not even going to attempt to try to put those jeans on – era. And back to another gym I went. But this time I wasn’t motivated for it because I knew that while I may lose the weight I will ultimately get bored with the gym, stop going, gain even more weight back and continue this process forever!
So I stopped going altogether and bought a treadmill and some free weights. I had been on the treadmill off and on for a few years when I realized I had gained another twenty pounds that I needed to get off. To be honest walking on the treadmill was pretty much the most I pushed myself. My heartbeat never had a chance to get pumping because I never let it.
So I bought an elliptical. That would for sure get my heart rate pumping I told myself. But it’s very easy to get lost in TV land and just kind of robotically go up and down on an elliptical with not much effort.
Well let’s just say I eventually was forty pounds heavier than the days of dancing and eating whatever I wanted. True, I probably could have added on even more if I had not done my yo-yo gym routines but to be honest it was getting very hard if not impossible to lose the weight and I was at a loss of what I was doing wrong. It used to be so easy for me.
After talking about it with my husband I remembered that I used to do a lot of weights when I first started. Even at my job I was lifting, pushing, and pulling. In fact, cardio had benn boring to me in the gym and I could only make it through the recommended ten minutes of warm-up most of the time. I would then focus my attention on the weights and completely exhaust myself with them. And that’s when the light bulb turned on.
I hadn’t been doing weights because we have free weights and I didn’t know how to utilize them properly. I had seen the commercials for the resistance band, and the exercise ball, and even the use your own body weight for building muscle but I was tricked into thinking that the gym was the only way I could have a good weight workout. I also thought that cardio was the key point in losing weight. Somewhere along the line I had learned this about cardio and embedded it into my brain.
Now I know it’s not true. Not only is cardio not the only way to lose weight but building muscle is vital to losing weight and being healthy.
And you don’t have to go to the gym to achieve it. You can get the same muscle building and fat burning workout at home by using the proper techniques and schedule.
Today I actually have a productive workout at home schedule and I don’t have to sign up with gym anymore.
I found the step by step routine I required to apply to my life and cut out the yo-yo workout routine I was stuck in from http://getfit-4-life.com.
