Just because I am a doctor, and encourage patients every day to exercise, doesn’t mean that I don’t have my own issues with getting sufficient exercise. Long hours, tiring days, family obligations, illness: they are all stumbling blocks, no matter what your occupation.
I have been recording my exercise weekly, mostly to keep myself accountable for reaching my goal (sometimes this works, sometimes I miss). If anyone reads this, I hope they will take this as encouragement to keep going, acknowledgement that it isn’t always easy.
As a reminder, my goal is to make sure that I get my 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise (or 75 minutes of high intensity exercise, which probably won’t happen).
I had wanted to work on strength training, but that fell by the wayside after several attempts to do this on my own. In September, I made arrangements to work with a trainer, as my last ditch attempt to incorporate this into my fitness regimen. We are meeting weekly for now.
- Saturday: A long day of work and less than ideal weather. No exercise outdoors, and I wasn’t really excited about indoor exercise either.
- Sunday: Walked part way home, 27 minutes.
- Monday: Walked part way home, 27 minutes. Then got a lift to the gym, where I met my trainer for 30 minutes of strength training. Today was clearly a win for having a trainer, I did not feel like working out at all.
- Tuesday: I was all ready to walk home, but work lasted just that little bit too long. I took a little walk around the neighborhood when I got home; it wasn’t even enough to trigger my Fitbit (though it was just nice to get outside). Officially I’ll say I had zero minutes of exercise.
- Wednesday: It was crazy busy at work today, no chance to exercise.
- Thursday: Also today, the hospital was super busy. No exercise.
- Friday: Again, the hospital was very busy, but I was tired of missing my exercise. I dressed properly for the weather, and did my walk to the usual pick up point in the dark. It was so nice to get out and walk, even if I still had lots of work to finish from home. 21 minutes of walking.
Total: 75 minutes walking and 30 minutes with weights. Even adding those times together, I am still not even close to my weekly goal. We’ll see how work goes next week.