Fitness and the gym… they’re inextricably linked!
You only need to search the #fitness hashtag on instagram to see that the free-weights aesthetic reigns supreme, with health influencer economy running almost entirely on the currency of Lycra and lunges, or so it seems!
YAWN!!
Despite once loving and living for the gym…the #cardioday treadmill is one that I have zero interest in jumping back on any time soon.
HIIT training… yes!
Running… yes!
Swimming… hell yes!
The exercise bike…a million times no!
It begs the question, as to what changed so dramatically, that a former gym-devotee could so suddenly fall out of love with the 20-minutes-a-day cycling sanity that, for the longest time, not even rainy days or Sundays could persuade me against!
The answer?
Kids!
Quite simply!
A gargantuan overhaul of routine and lifestyle was enough, in my case, to strong arm the gym habit of an almost-lifetime into redundancy, and forge a new, home-based HIIT routine in its place.
Fast forward 7 years, and it’s hard now to reconcile this former fitness life, with the (in my view) much healthier approach of today.
With the benefit of hindsight and my now-broadened workout horizons, I can see that the problem with #gymlife - and the reason I’ve become its almost antithesis - is that it shackles the benefits of movement (mental and physical) to one location, thereby making it the epitome of inflexibility!
The irony!
Not only this, there’s a two-birds-one-stone satisfaction to ANY workout which can be executed in the kitchen, all whilst simultaneously rustling up some pesto pasta, and right now, this kind of ‘personal best’ seems infinitely better than any machine-generated one which DOESN’T come with a chaser of ‘dinner… done!’