First time ever to the gym! Dumpling Adventure

So I’ve never really been an athletic person. Last year I began exercising but that was just me either running around the block or playing with ‘Just Dance’ on my Wii. I managed to loose quite a lot of weight and felt very fit and healthy. But at the beginning of this year (while I was still on exchange) for about a month in January I just completely broke and was eating takeaway and fast food everyday. Things just got away from me and after Uni and family health problems I hadn’t had the chance to get back to being fit.

What my traditional ‘work out’ looked like

So my friend was talking about joining our University’s gym. I was actually incredibly apprehensive. My parents have been bugging me to go to the gym forever. But the image I had of the gym was of incredibly fit people
jogging at mach speed or lifting ridiculous weights. I was intimidated and actually a bit afraid of being made fun of – especially of my body which I wasn’t comfortable with. But I put those fears aside and signed up last week.

Today was my first session at the gym. I wore a very baggy t-shirt and some old sports shoes. Walking in I felt incredibly embarrassed, most of the people were wearing proper sports clothes and weirdly enough people actually looked kind of fashionable. It actually took me about 20 minutes to realise that while I was paying attention to what everyone was wearing and fretting about my own outfit, no one gave a crap about what I was wearing. People were just focusing on their exercise.

What was even better was that there was such a broad range of people going to the gym. Sure there were the really fit ‘superheroes in making ‘but there were also other ‘average’ people. Again, everyone just stuck to their own exercise and weren’t too concerned about what level you were at. My friend and I even headed out to the lifting area and failed so badly at lifting just the bar – but the other gym members kept going and didn’t even look our way.

Maybe in a couple of months I’ll look like this

All in all it was actually a really fun experience. I ended up doing about 45 minutes of moderate exercise. I felt super comfortable in the gym, I think it’s like that terrible feeling of doing Sports of Health Classes in High School that created this fear of doing exercise around other people. What’s even more exciting is that tomorrow afternoon I’ll be doing one of their Zumba classes – am so excited to be taking the first steps on my fitness journey 🙂