029E9: Finally Going Back to the Gym

Back to the Gym?

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 476

One of my biggest fitness achievements for last year was actually signing up for a gym membership at Anytime Fitness. It was an interesting few months as I started to enjoy my early morning gym sessions - right up until 2020 changed for the worse and the global COVID-19 pandemic ruined life as we knew it.

So I've avoided going back to the gym throughout most of the quarantine period, even when they allowed gyms to partially re-open as early as last year. I had mostly survived by keeping my membership on a frozen status, but this year they announced a service fee to continue to keep my account frozen. So I figured it was okay to just pay my membership fee without going to the gym since at least my contract duration would start to move again.

Today marks 2 weeks since my second Sinovac vaccination, so officially I'm fully vaccinated. I know this doesn't make me immune from the virus, but I am in a much better position to fight it off. Coincidentally, Anytime Fitness has once again resumed charging for membership this month since Metro Manila has been under GCQ for a while now. And rather than just dismiss the fees or think about freezing my account again, I figured that maybe it was finally time to go back.

I've actually reserved one of the 1.5 hours slots at my home branch tomorrow but I'm still nervous about things. Given we've mostly stayed home for a better part of more than a year, it's a big change in our routine and I doubt I'll ever feel 100% good about it. Plus Tobie hasn't even gotten his first vaccination shot yet, so he's still very much at risk and I might somehow bring COVID-19 home. We take a lot of precautions to stay safe like taking showers immediately upon returning home, but who knows, right?

But as much as I have made the most of working out at home with minimal equipment, I have also been at a bit of a plateau in terms of my weight-loss efforts. That's the main draw of going back to the gym - access to functional fitness equipment like medicine balls, kettlebells, and just heavier dumbbells. 

So this is the plan for now. The only things that will get in the way of this are me not waking up in time or the weather gets really bad and walking to the gym becomes an impractical idea. But I know I need to gets started sooner rather than later or I'll never get around to it. And I'm super not used to waking up as early as I used to when I was still going to the gym before the quarantine period, and I do want to get back into that habit. And while I don't plan to resume almost daily gym sessions, I do intend to go to the gym whenever the Nike Training App assigns me a workout that doesn't just consist of bodyweight exercises, at least to start. That way it still somewhat limits my exposure, maybe. 

Wish me luck. 

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