Free fitness for February: End of week 1

You might remember that I mentioned my plan to get fitter this month without any additional outlay a few days ago. Here’s how week 1 went:

• Tues 1st Feb: 25 minutes of brisk walking outdoors. Felt fine during and afterwards, but hated the drizzle.

• Weds 2nd Feb: A quick warm up then 60 minutes of step*. Fine during exercise, but felt shocking afterwards (never been like that before after step) so I’m probably still a bit post-viral.

• Thurs 3rd Feb: Decided to do some gentle stretching and toning for flexibility. Used one of those free channels to do pilates and yoga to increase the range of upper body movement and improve posture. Did 25 mins, not counting the ad breaks.

• Fri 4th Feb: Back to the aerobic exercise with 60 minutes of free step on top speed, plus 50 sit-ups. Fine during and after, and the following day the muscles felt exercised without being properly painful.

How did it go? I was slightly surprised at how bad I felt on Wednesday (sick and dizzy rather than just tired), so decided to go really slow on Thursday then push it a tiny amount on Friday. It’s probably just a case of factoring in ‘rest’ days, and keeping things ticking over while my health improves itself over the next week or so. Frustrating though, this being patient lark.

Having said that, we all know people who go on these OTT and impractical health kicks – they never last and more often than not, injuries are involved. Most of us probably know other people who make loads of excuses for not exercising either. Just trying to find a sensible balance between the two extremes of human nature.

What’s next? I’ll have a quick look around the house for old sports equipment, as the last people who lived here left all sorts of things behind. Might send off for a free exercise DVD or find a good low impact workout on YouTube as well, or record a couple of fitness progs off the telly. Today I’m hoping to garden later, if the weather holds, so that’s some digging and lifting, and tomorrow I’ll try to put an hour of some kind of aerobic exercise in.

I’m also going to try to line up some free gym passes so I can get a free swim or two in, and use some decent core weights machines. Will let you know how that works out – bet there’s a lot of BS and hard sell involved with quite a few of these chains…

Wish me luck!

Are you trying to get fit too? Any ideas for freebie fitness?

*We exchanged our supermarket clubcard points for a Wii Fit in the Argos sale about 18 months ago, best freebie ever – nice to blow the dust off it! There’s a ‘free step’ function on it that lets you watch TV while you exercise.