Fueling Your Twenties: A Guide to Fitness and Nutrition

This is just for inspiration and ideas, what I eat in a day is not exactly what you should be eating in a day 🙂

I started to take fitness seriously during a period when I was not taking any classes, so I had to adapt my routine quite a bit when I started taking classes again. It boils down to three things: a realistic routine, preparation and organization, and discipline.

A realistic routine is one that makes it the easiest for you to stick to it. If you are not a morning person, don’t schedule 5 a.m. workouts five days a week before class. If you rely on public transit, factor in commute time. If you know that you have a day where you have to work and go to class, maybe schedule a rest day. Within your routine, it’s important to use your time wisely. I take public transit and it’s at least an hour and a half each way to campus, so I often use that time to do my readings. I will also watch videos and lectures while I’m on the treadmill at the end of my workout.

Being organized will save you. This is not my strong suit, but I’ve developed a few tips and tricks to keep myself on track that might help you out as well. On Sunday, I sit down with my work schedule, my assignment due dates, and my workout program and I write down every one of my commitments and due dates for the week. Once I have those in my calendar, I schedule my workouts for the week around that. This ensures that I am prioritizing school while also doing the things I love. This has been a pretty fool proof system for me so far, but there are weeks where I have to more flexible and spend more time doing schoolwork than I do in the gym, which is totally okay! It’s all about finding the right balance.

While a realistic routine and some good organization can help you a lot, a schedule like this requires a lot of discipline. It’s really easy to make excuses and say that you’re too tired to workout after a busy day, but sometimes you just have to push through and do it. Every time that I consider skipping a workout and end up going, I feel so proud. Every time you push through, you’re practicing discipline and showing yourself that you are capable of doing hard things. It is important to note that there is a difference between discipline and pushing yourself past your limits. If your body isn’t properly fuelled and needs to rest, listen to it.

In the last six months or so, I have really focused on consistency and discipline and I started to feel kind of invincible. It seemed like no matter how hard I pushed myself, I was making huge improvements in my performance and I was able to recover well, but last week it all caught up to me and I got injured. Luckily, the injury isn’t serious and all I need is some time away from the gym to rest and recover, but it’s frustrating nonetheless. The physical benefits are a huge part of why I take the gym so seriously but it’s also one of the main things I do to take care of my mental health, so having to take a couple weeks off has really taken a toll on me. Setbacks are inevitable, especially if your fitness journey is a lifelong one, so learning how to deal with or cope with them is going to help you out a lot in the long run.

If you’re dealing with something like an injury, of course, the first step should be to take care of yourself physically. Whether it’s resting, going to the doctor or a physiotherapist, or just adapting your training until you recover, listening to your body is the most important step. Even minor injuries need care so that they don’t turn into major injuries, so listen to the warning signs from your body and don’t push it past its limits. A few days, or even a few weeks, out of the gym to recover is not going to kill your progress, so take the time when you need it.

I find the mental impact of these types of setbacks to be harder to deal with than the actual injury itself. Filling the time that I would normally spend in the gym with other self care activities has been the most helpful thing I’ve tried so far. Personally, I love to read, write, and crochet, so I have been dedicating at least an hour a day to these things. While they are super different from working out, they help me stay grounded and keep my mind busy, which is exactly what the gym does for me. I have also been trying to stay active in other ways. The injury that I’m dealing with allows me to go for walks and stretch, so I’ve been trying to do a little bit of that every day to keep my body moving and blow off some steam.

Long story short, injuries suck and are super frustrating, but it is so important to take time to recover so that you can get back to working toward your goals.