Do You Get Enough Exercise?
BY MICHAEL GONCHAR DECEMBER 15, 2015 5:00 AM
I think that I get either 60 minutes of activity recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or a little below it everyday.
In school, I either get this by walking up and down the stairs the whole day, rushing to classes and during PE class on Wednesdays as well. Outside of school, I do tennis three times a week for an hour and a half each session and I go running in the ECP on certain occasions as well, completing more than 7km each time.
I usually have the time to exercise in the school day because I, in a sense do exercise at school without realising it; like I said before, having to rush to classes and running up the stairs, or being active in PE class helps me exercise the parts of the body used for these activities such as calves and core muscles.
I do like to exercise, because I am someone who gets very restless if I sit around all day. I also exercise through playing tennis, which is my favourite sport to play and therefore I enjoy exercising through playing it. I don’t necessarily like running or cardio, or doing pushups and other core exercises, but I know that I have to do these exercises if I want to remain healthy and be able to eat different kinds of food without worry of gaining fat intakes.
I usually exercise intensely three times a week. I wish that I exercised more, but I just feel too exhausted after school and I have homework to do, so the days that I do not have tennis after school are given up to homework and me being too tired; I think that this is due to a lack of a proper amount of sleep, therefore I need to work on creating a more effective sleep schedule should I want to have the energy to exercise after a tough day of school as well.
The fact that you brought up not having enough time to exercise because of homework and being too tired really resonated with me, as it is a problem I have always had. I noticed that during the summer, I got a lot fitter because I had plenty of time to exercise, but I’ve been losing track of it since the beginning of the school year.
What makes this issue complex is that we can’t stop doing homework or sleeping in order too keep fit, so it’s really hard to balance everything. I think a way we could do this is focus on exercising more on the weekend, or perhaps managing our time to have a little bit of exercise after doing homework on weekdays.
Just saying that I am the kind of person who really lacks exercise in my life…I agree with how you said that we get more exercise in school while not realizing it because in order to get to different places in school we will have to walk and climb stairs. Also the mandatory PE classes each week contributed to one of my few exercises. But a big problem for me is that I am the least motivated to do exercise outside the school when I just feel tired or too lazy to do anything.
However, it is an existing issue that later in the IB we would not have PE anymore, so we will eventually find some ways to motivate ourselves to exercise outside the school, despite the fact that we might be exhausted afterward. Working out on weekends or during the breaks could be good options.