I have been extremely passionate towards workouts since I came to UWCSEA, because here I have access to the gym almost everyday. I have thoroughly planned a workout routine in order to workout on a daily basis and meanwhile ensure that I have the time to study and review. Since I have last blocks free during every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I always go to the gym and workout for about two and a half hours, including both cardio and strength, and fortunately, I have one day to let my muscles well-rested between each workout day. This has helped me to release the study pressure and make my school life extremely substantial.

During the workouts, I find that I’m better at doing cardio instead of resistance training, which can be seen in my Body Pump activity experience as well. For example, I could be running for 40 minutes on a constant speed at 8.5km/h, but I could only lift up 4kg of weights on each hand while doing weightlifting. This is also due to my unbalanced body strength, because I have more strength in my lower body (legs) as I have been dancing for ten years. Dancing can be considered as a cardio workout because it is long-interval but low-intensity training. Therefore, I have got good heart and lung capacity, making me capable to run for a long time. The strong lower body strength also helps to support my body during training. 

However, my upper body’s strength is pretty weak, especially the core. When doing core strength workout, I often use my waist to help me lift the weights instead of using the abdomen, which is harmful to the waist as it is bearing too much weight. Therefore, recently, I am focusing more on training my core strength by doing core-specific workout such as planks and crunches, and I looked into the mirror regularly in order to check whether or not I’m doing them correctly. I think checking is very important when doing workout, because wrong positions will not only affect the results of the workout, but will even harm the body and muscles.

Additionally, I find my another activity has largely impacted on my gym activity, which is the Body Pump – It is a weight-training workout targeting mainly on the upper body muscles, and I have made huge progress on it as I talked about in the Body Pump reflections. This has also increased my performance in the gym, such that I can lift more weights compared to me previously after three-weeks’ training of Body Pump. At first I was only capable to hold the 3kg weights when doing dumbbell front squats, but now I can lift 5kg on each side. 

Overall, I think my strength is doing well in the cardio workout, while my weakness is the resistance training. However, through the gym activity, I have found myself improving on my upper body strength and performing better when doing upper body workout, which is a good trend to follow.

 

LO1: AWARENESS (Increased awareness of strength and area of growth)

LO4: COMMITMENT (Showing perseverance, resilience)