Saturday night my roommate challenged me to join her in a new internet health challenge doing 100 squats every day for a month. Now, I agree that this sounds like literal torture but for some crazy reason, I said yes.
I’ll be honest, the first four days were absolute hell. I was so sore that just walking around campus was painful, I don’t even want to remember hiking up and down those stairs to upper-campus – I can’t possibly pay enough in therapy to relive it. Not to mention the fact that I have a loft bed, just thinking about crawling up that ladder was enough to make me seriously consider sleeping on the floor.
However, now that we are on the fifth day I am starting to feel somewhat human again. But this is after several days of feeling like my legs were one part jelly and two parts pain.
Additionally, if that wasn’t masochistic enough, on the second day I started following the squats with a basic ab workout since I guess I wasn’t in enough pain already.
Now, I used to be a dancer and so at one point in time I did enough plie’s to put 100 squats to shame. But let me tell you, the body that could do that without any problem is quite firmly in my past.
I used to be quite the athlete between dance, track and softball training in high school. I remember days when I was hungry enough to eat the entire fridge. I am currently experiencing flashbacks to those times and yet I can’t indulge because of my firm status and an incredibly poor college student.
I have to say that the absolute worst part of this challenge isn’t the pain but feeling constantly hungry. I am burning a lot more calories than I am taking in so I guess my next step is to try and rework my diet.
I mean I already knew that living off of CapriSun and granola bars was no way to live a full life but I’ve been managing so far. My body, however, is certainly loving my increase in protein as it fondly remembers the days of my youth when a protein shake and half a bagel was the breakfast of champions – rather than my current status chewing gum and drinking water while ignoring the grumbling because I didn’t wake up early enough to eat.
Honestly, this refresher course in what it means to take care of myself if quite welcome. In 64 short days, I will no longer be a college student who can excuse my bad health habits on the fact that my life revolves around my classes.
So I guess the takeaway from this experiment is that I have really let myself go and that completing a Squat-o’clock challenge is much more of a lifestyle change than I expected.
But as my lovely roommate said: “DO IT FOR THE BOOTY!”
Story by: Alexis J. Taylor
accent@suunews.net
Photo by: Meghan Holmes on Unsplash.com
