Personal Challenge

For the personal challenge that I decided to attempted for this blog, I chose a two-week ab exercise challenge from a popular YouTuber Chloe Ting. While watching YouTube one day, I came across a video of a women completing this two-week challenge and showing her results. I was very impressed with her results and this motivated me to try it out for myself. This challenge is a ten-minute video that you incorporate after every workout with the recommendation to do it five times a week. I thought that these exercises would be challenging enough but not so hard that I would give up easily. In the past, I have tried workout challenges but I never fully dedicated myself to them because I started them for the wrong reason. I was always focused on losing weight and trying to look “skinny”. After failing multiple times because of this mindset, I wanted to shift my mindset and focus on goals other than just how the exercises would make me look.

By participating in this challenge, I wanted to see how hard I could physically push my body. I really enjoy working out especially at the gym but before starting this challenge I was finding myself not being very enthusiastic about my workouts. They were very repetitive and I was having a hard time pushing myself and working harder. By adding this new set of exercises, I was excited to really push myself harder throughout my workouts but I also wanted to leave my old mindset behind. When I didn’t feel confident in my body I would try these fitness challenges to “fix” my body. However, it would never work and I when I wouldn’t see results, I would just get upset and give up. I want to be able to complete this challenge without focusing on how it makes my body look and focus instead on how it makes my body feel.

How Was The Challenge

So how did this challenge go? I believe I was successful in completing this challenge. There were days where it was extremely tough to even think about going to workout and this was definitely the biggest hurdle I had to overcome. When I stated this challenge, Danielle (from this class) and I were regularly already going to the gym together so when I told her about incorporating this ab workout, she also decided to do it with me. Having her do this challenge with me definitely helped me in so many ways. We kept each other accountable for scheduling and simply just showing up and giving the workout our best effort. When we would do the ab workout, we would encourage each other not to take breaks. It became a fun and healthy competition between us that helped motivate me further.

I learned that I am capable of completing a fitness challenge when I set goals to better my fitness and not focus on how it will make my body look. This was the greatest lesson I learned throughout this process. Going to the gym excites me so much more now that I have seen how dedicated I can be to something and see positive results. The results from this challenge are not only visual (I’ve noticed some definition in my abs) but more of an increase in endurance and strength. It’s crazy how much stronger my core is now after this challenge and now I am excited and willing to try something like this again!

After completing this assignment, I’ve learned many things about how to properly approach a fitness challenge. The most important one is having a healthy and realistic mindset about what you are trying to accomplish by completing it. Like I said previously, I would always begin fitness challenges with the hope that I would lose weight. However, I could never complete them. With this challenge, it was extremely important that I just focused on the fitness goal and personal growth I wanted to see. Another lesson that I will be able to apply in the future is navigating my scheduling to complete certain tasks. I purchased a planner and used my calendar in my phone to set times and reminders about when it would be the most productive to go to the gym, do homework and be able to give my body rest whenever it needs.