Tenner Week Jan 2018: Day 3: Keep up your fitness levels

We’re on to Day Three of our January £10 budgeting challenge, so let’s continue keep that spending low, low, low in the run up to payday.

The Bonus Point we’re covering today is ‘keep up your fitness levels’, and the specific activity is to get at least 30 minutes of exercise. If you aren’t currently at peak fitness, make a bit of an effort but please don’t overdo it.

As we’re on the tightest of budgets, try to find ways to exercise that are free (or very low cost) or that make use of equipment or subscriptions that you already have.

Need inspiration? Here are a few quick ideas:

• If you own a bike, go cycling
• Dust down those weights or exercise machines
• Use an exercise Blu-Ray you already own or have borrowed
• Go for a walk or a run
• Do some yoga or pilates matwork at home
• Use your gym membership
• Do a free taster class or local subsidised class
• Use an exercise game on a games console
• Dance to your favourite music
• Join friends for football, jogging or other fitness

I’m sure you can think of plenty more ideas, but those are a few good places to start.

Make an effort and work up a bit of a sweat, but remember to warm up and warm down. If you’re a bit under the weather today, don’t overdo it – you can always catch up on this task at the weekend if you need to.

What’s happening here

I’m going to a pre-paid yoga lesson in my lunch break (it’s cheaper by 20% if you pay in advance), so I’ll be making the most of my exercise credit. If I hadn’t prepaid, I would probably have tried to find a low or medium impact yoga lesson on YouTube, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing a high impact one if you don’t have any previous yoga experience.

That’s a 75 minute session, including a warm up and final relaxation, so that’s more than the required 30 minutes. It’s part of my January goal to do at least seven exercise classes in one month, and will be session five.

Yesterday I resisted the urge to go out for coffee and cake, but I did go out to the library in my lunch break. I’d pre-ordered a couple of books and had to pay 50p for each of them when I picked them up. In hindsight, they do keep them for up to three weeks for you and I could have put it off, but I was going to have to pay that £1 eventually anyway and it seemed silly not to just get on with it.

I’ll try for a no-spend day today, so there’s something left for the weekend out of my tenner. I’m off to a new pre-paid evening class tonight too, so hopefully that’ll keep me away from the telly and out of the pub as well.

Spent yesterday: £1.00

Total spent so far: £1.00

What kind of exercise will you be doing today? Something completely free, something with a subscription, or something low cost?