I’d like to say that my return to boot camp class at my gym was a great success and that I left the class in a moment of triumph. It wasn’t quite that exciting, I confess. In fact, I felt glad that I managed to scrape through the session.
I realized that I had not been to boot camp class in almost two years. How is that possible? I went to this class every Saturday morning for several years. Well, I was dealing with some family issues out of town in the beginning of 2020 and then of course the gyms as well as the world just shut down.
I returned to the gym over a year ago but at first the classes at the gym had not resumed. Then, when they did, I just couldn’t get the motivation to show up at the class.
A couple of weeks ago, I was heading into the gym locker room on Saturday morning and ran into one of my fellow boot camp attendees. She said, “are you going to boot camp?”
I answered, “No, I’m going swimming today. I don’t feel like I’m boot camp worthy right now.”
She said, “Oh sure you are. You should come.”
Return to Boot Camp Class
That actually motivated me so I returned to class last Saturday.
The class was a High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) session. We just discussed on the podcast episode with Pam Semanik about the benefits of doing HIIT so I was pleased. The class was basically 30 seconds of exercise broken with 15 seconds of rest. We did strength exercises with kettlebells (squats, skull crushers, biceps curls, etc.) and more cardio based exercises (burpees, jumping jacks, ice skaters, etc.)
Those cardio exercises were tough for me. I guess I hadn’t done them in those two years so I was struggling. I’ve been keeping up on strength workouts so I didn’t have as much difficulty with them.
After we finished the HIIT portion of class, we did a number of abs workouts followed by a stretching cool down.
It was nice to see a lot of familiar faces and hear people say how good it was to see me. It made me happy to return to boot camp class.
I guess I need to return to my routine and keep going to boot camp. I suspect I can get back into shape fairly quickly.
What have you struggled to get back to after the break in our normal activities? Let me know!