Exercise class adventures

I’m sure many of you will be familiar with the New Year’s resolution ‘get fit’. After a Christmas of staying indoors, watching television and eating far too much chocolate, I decided enough was enough. January was going to be different. January was going to be the start of the new, healthy me – less chocolate, more exercise, an all-round healthier lifestyle. But how was I going to do this? As I browsed the internet looking for inspiration, I realised just how little I knew about ways to get fit. In terms of exercise, I had always assumed you either played a team sport like football or went to the gym. And with the arrival of January snow, playing football outside didn’t seem like the most attractive option, and as I have a deep-rooted fear of falling off running machines, the gym wasn’t going to work out either. (Pun intended.) Plus I’ve never quite understood the concept of paying to run inside when you could run outside for free!

I therefore knew that I needed to research my options further. The first thing I found was the world of YouTube exercise videos – yoga, Pilates, Zumba ... there are videos for just about everything. The good thing about YouTube videos is that they are free, they are flexible (you can do them whenever you want, and you can even pause them part-way through if they are going too fast!) and you don’t have to leave your nice warm house to do them. But unless you do them with a friend I found it’s difficult to motivate yourself to keep going, and without an instructor there with you it’s sometimes hard to know if you’re doing the move correctly.

I then researched local fitness classes and found my small town to be absolutely swimming with opportunity! I quickly signed up to the overall sports club, had a look at the weekly timetable and decided to try them all out. One month into my new fitness regime and I have tried out fitness kickboxing, step-aerobics, LaGym (a bit like Zumba and definitely my favourite so far), Pilates, and aroha (a sort of mix between martial arts and dance, involving a lot of squats!). Aqua-jogging (running in the swimming pool? Sounds amazing!) and WorldJumping are still on my to-do list. The best thing about these classes is that they’re not too expensive, they take place inside and you can meet new people while doing them. My favourite ones are by far the dance-based ones that take place to music, because it makes exercise so much more fun!