My Gift to Me (no wrapping required)

I was busy yesterday so I didn’t get to read Sam’s post until just now. This wasn’t written in response to hers, but I think it complements it nicely. I’m definitely not aiming to be in peak anything by January but fitting in some more fitness is how I *want* to enjoy my holiday time. 

My (non)schedule is one of the major obstacles in my efforts to establish a daily exercise plan. It’s not that I am ‘too busy’ to exercise every day, it’s that my days are a bit of a jumble and I have trouble eking out a regular time to move.

I’m self-employed, I work from home, and my family starts school/comes home for lunch/after school at a variety of different times.* My kids are mostly able to manage their schedules on their own but, they’re still teenagers, and so they often need my support to keep things moving. Then, during the afternoons and evenings there’s homework, and projects for the boys, and projects, meetings, household management, taekwon-do, and volunteer work for me. And, of course, my husband has his own business, and sometimes his work schedule affects the rhythm of when and how all of the rest of that can happen.

Then, if you factor in my ADD (prioritizing, distractions, schedules, and recovering from interruptions are a particular challenge for me), it’s obvious why I end up struggling to see how everything can fit into a given day. To expand on what I said above, I have time to exercise every day.  I just get so caught up in work and details and interruptions that I find myself annoyed when I run out of day and have to go to bed.

Now, I do okay, overall. I do a fair bit of walking – even though my youngest son no longer *needs* me to walk him to school, I use his schedule as an excuse to get out of the house and go for a short stroll. I go to taekwon-do twice a week.  I practice at home, and I do stretches and yoga, and the like, but it’s not regular and it’s not intense.

I feel my best when I work out daily but somehow that fact escapes me as I make decisions about what to do next in any given day. That overall feeling of well-being gets lost in the shuffle of daily priorities and I don’t like it.

That’s why I have decided that I am gifting myself a habit-establishing fitness routine over the holiday season.

I know that a lot of people find it hard to stick to habits this time of year but for me, the break from daily comings and goings is an opportunity rather than an obstacle. I know what my next couple of weeks are going to look like and I have very few external forces shaping my days. Or, to put it another way, *I* can make everyone wait while I finish my workout and no one will end up with detention as a result.

I’m not going to try anything drastic, and I will be realistic. I’m just going to do at least 30 minutes of movement in the rec room every day, as soon as possible after I wake up. The plan is to alternate between yoga, taekwon-do practice, strength training, and cardio but I will do whichever one feels most fun on a given day.

This isn’t something I *must* do, it’s a gift to myself.

Happy Holidays, me! Today’s present is yoga. Enjoy!

* I have people leaving my house separately in the morning in time to get to work/school at 8:10, 8:15 and 8:30. One person has lunch from 12-1, another from 12:20-1:10. My kids finish school at 2:10 and 2:30. That’s a lot of coming and going.

PS – Happy Holidays to all of you! No matter what you are celebrating or not celebrating, I hope these last few days of 2017 find you at ease. I wish you joy and I wish you fun. See you in 2018!