A little over a year ago, the world saw itself on the precipice of territory the majority of us had never encountered. While the pandemic changed so many aspects of our lives and presented its fair number of challenges, it also gave us a tremendous gift.
It gave us the time most of us were so desperately seeking to get our wellness and workout routines as habitual aspects of our lives. We finally had the time we wanted to cook, to have time with our families, and to workout consistently.
While we embraced the opportunity to work out consistently, we were establishing a home workout routine in an isolated bubble. We saw the chance, we took advantage of it, and the result of our hard work is the change we have been talking about for years.
Taking advantage of that chance meant having a certain degree of tunnel vision, staying hyper-focused on the present, but not looking towards the future and how to workout after the pandemic.
The flexibility of our day and schedule is slowly transitioning away, with us slowly transitioning back into our previously chaotic schedules.
Fortunately, the transition gives us the necessary time to make sure that our home workout regiment is sustainable and realistic for our lives once the chaos kicks back in. If we can be intentional with this time, we can make sure that we do not regress on the progress we have made with our workouts over the past year.
1. Sit down with your schedule
The first way to make sure you continue to workout after the pandemic is to be intentional with your workouts. If you want to continue to workout after the pandemic, you need to be purposeful with scheduling and executing your home workouts.
Being mindful of the time you have available to workout, planning your workouts into your schedule, and knowing what those workouts will look like will help you continue the progress you started during the pandemic.
For example: if you know you have an hour open to do a home workout, but you need 20 minutes after the workout to shower, get dressed, and eat, you only have 40 minutes open to workout.
Need a quick workout? Grab the Tabata workout below!
Tabata
- 12 rounds
- 20 seconds of work
- 10 seconds of rest
- Alternate your exercises on each round
- Swings
- Plank pass throughs
- Kneeling bicep curls
(If you need more specifics on how to plan your home workouts, please refer to my previous article, “How to Plan Workouts”).
2. Stay consistent
This is the part of working out that is much easier said than done. More often than not, workout regiments are maintained for shorter durations like 30 or 60 days, creating a yo-yo effect with workouts.
That yo-yo effect leads to eventual regression and that regression is understandably frustrating. There is nothing more debilitating than making a ton of progress, just to let life get the best of you and when you come back, knowing you have to make up all that progress and time that you lost on your home workouts.
3. Make your workouts a priority
Staying consistent is one of the hardest things for people to adhere to because we are busy with lots of different things pulling at our time and energy.
Ultimately, the results you want from your workouts after the pandemic are only achievable and sustainable if you make those workouts a priority.
You had the time during the pandemic because a lot of things were no longer a priority. But when those aspects of life come back into play, you have to continue to make working out be in that list as well.
This is where scheduling your workouts becomes even more important. You have the time and workouts can happen consistently, but you have to ensure that you are being conscientious of those efforts just as you would any other important aspect of life.
That means as you grow and change so do your workouts. Instead of giving yourself goals, set standards and expectations for how you will show up for yourself.
Grab the workout below and see how you show up for yourself today and then a month from now.
- EMOM
- 10 Minutes
- 10 Thrusters
4. Take ownership of your workouts
A lot of people were discouraged for a multitude of reasons when the gyms closed as a result of the pandemic. We tend to thrive off of the energy of the people around us.
We let our competitive nature with the person next to us drive our performance. Ultimately, your performance in a workout is not determined by the person next to you but in how you show up for yourself.
Or we think we need to be doing the same as we did before. The best way to gain strength and see change is to accept where you are, and know that every day you do the work, you are getting stronger.
Here’s a workout to track your progress:
- AMRAP
- 10 minutes
- 8 push ups
- 10 crunches
- 12 squats
Try it, and take note of how many rounds you get through. In a month, do the workout again and see if you can get more rounds than the previous attempt. Keep up with this routine as a quantitative measure of tracking your strength and improvements on your at home workouts.
Thrive off the reason why you are choosing to take time out of your day to workout. Ultimately, that will be the biggest motivator to get you to continually show up for yourself regardless of the state of the world, your gym, and even your life.
Use it as a means to drive you forward so the progress you created in the past year does not go to waste but stays consistent, with you continuing to see results from all of your hard work.
