Reflections After a Year at the Gym

Over a bit more than a year ago, I started going to the gym. Since then, I went from going there one time a week, to two times a week, and more recently to three times a week. During this time, many things have changed, from my goals, progress, and how I feel about sports and being active in general.

💡 The Decision

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you may know that I developed an achilles tendinitis around less than two years ago. This was around the same time I had started becoming more active after the pandemic 🦠, started playing badminton, sometimes squash and going to spinning classes. Unfortunately, I then stopped with all this things. My anxiety around health-related issues didn’t really help.

So in the first few months of last year, already feeling better about my achilles but occasionally still struggling, I considered starting going to a gym. With a personal trainer. My goal was two folded: help me overcome and deal with my achilles issues, as well as being consistent with being active and sports.

Since I’m not someone with any experience within the gym and sports real, I decided to work with a personal trainer: someone with experience that could tell me exactly what I need to do without me having to plan it myself. It’s been a bit longer than a year, and I definitely can say that I have no regrets.

🏅 The Results and Goals

In the beginning, I did a DEXA scan in order to have an idea of how much muscle, bone, fat, and other things my body has. I’ve repeated the same scan a few weeks ago.

On one hand, I was slightly disappointed with the fact that my fat percentage was about the same. However, I understand it: I’ve never actually done something to my diet, and despite having talked about it with the PT, it’s not something I worked actively on.

On the other hand, I had gained quite a few muscle. That’s nice and good to know that all the effort I put into the exercises at the gym had a result. And I also enjoyed the process, the feeling of pushing my limits there. All of this have helped me with my strength and endurance.

From now on I want to focus more on my nutrition. I don’t want to track caloric intake and measure every single thing I eat, even though I think I would love to see all of this data. But it’s so much work! I will start by focusing on not eating things that are obviously not good, and also not eating too much. Especially when I go to Portugal.

💪 Sport Types

During this past year, I have done different sorts of workouts. Weight lifting was always present, but at some point started doing cardio in the form of HIIT. More recently, we replaced the HIIT with 🥊 kickboxing because I was curious and my PT asked if I wanted to do it. I do highly recommend it: it’s a great way of getting tired and really moving your body.

From now on, I still plan on going to the gym three times a week, in the morning. But I have been thinking about other sports and other things I could do, especially things that would allow me to see nature, such as 🥾 hiking, 🚲 biking, and even ❄️ winter sports.

Biking is something I really enjoy, despite not doing it as much as I would like to. Therefore, I am going to try to introduce more biking here and there. So far I always used my e-bike for “longer” trips - which have also not really been that long -, but maybe it would be a nice thing to try to use my normal bike for longer trips. But I’m not sure how my city bike with 3 gears would hold up to such type of bike trip.

Yesterday I also got a weird obsession into my mind: skiing. I have tried skiing one time in 2019. Unfortunately it was during a week where I was sick, and I didn’t really have the “mental space” for it. It seems like a lot of fun the way you can go down a mountain while enjoying amazing views. So one of the things I hope I will do in 2025 is to try out skiing again, and hopefully better succeed at it.

Finally, I just want to say I don’t really regret my decision at all. It’s helped my energy, my strength and my endurance. And I feel good doing it. It wasn’t always easy: sore muscles can sometimes be very annoying, and I have done things wrong here and there and then had pain for a week or so. But it becomes better, it’s a learning experience, while improving myself.