It is now my twelfth entry for the 30 Days of blogging challenge. Today’s prompt is about a specific form of exercise that you’ve come to love and why. In the last two weeks, I have begun a yoga habit. As a large-bodied person, I have often struggled with maintaining a healthy weight. In my twenties, I tried a variety of exercises to try to lose weight. For a time I had taken up weightlifting, then I did a year of mixed martial arts and ended up doing bodyweight regimens while in the reserves. Since I have been working a remote job for the last year or so, I gained back the weight I’d lost during the last decade. No problem can always lose it again
Yoga for meditation and flexibility
Since I’m now in my thirties and not as physically active anymore, I needed to do something of low impact. The sedentary nature of my current job kind of killed whatever motivation I had for intense physical activity. While I would like to run and do pullups again, the hours of staring at screens cause me to become too exhausted for high-intensity workouts. Though the urge to move is ever-present.
In order to build back up this movement habit, I started doing a thirty-day yoga challenge. For the last nine days, I’ve gotten up and performed a follow-along routine on youtube. I decided to choose yoga because of the meditative aspect of the exercise. Being an introvert, I live inside my head. While I did enjoy weightlifting and MMA, I needed something that wouldn’t be around people.
Yoga helped me focus in a way that weightlifting and MMA couldn’t. When going through the flows, I could feel my mind relaxing. Focusing on breathing and the holds, fighting through the pain of unfamiliar movements, was a mind-expanding experience.
Furthermore, I found that doing these flows daily left me in a better mood throughout the day.
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