Hey everyone! This week I will be going over my fitness experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will be starting off with how the pandemic and OSU affected my life early on and then dive into the past year. I hope this blog helps others see how a regular person’s fitness journey is really dependent on life circumstances and that it is okay to not be working out 2 hours a day every day. This will be part 1 of 2. This part will cover 2020 year.
March 2020
Prior to starting Oregon State’s program, I worked out 5-6 a week for about 1-2 hours each session. I primarily lifted weights and played basketball here and there. At the start of March 2020, I had just gotten past my second quarter in the program while working 60 hours a week. My life consisted of a 45 min commute to FiDi in San Francisco and a 8 am – 8 pm work schedule. I did homework and lectures during my bus commute and for the most part, I had neglected my physical fitness. I knew that this was unstable.
After much thought, I decided to quit my full time job and dive into OSU’s CS program. I spent the next couple of weeks catching up on sleep, while starting to go on jogs (can’t call them runs because I wasn’t running 🙂 ). A month into being a full-time student, I felt like I had a lot more down time, but due to the pandemic, I was worried about going to the gym so I decided to not get a membership. However, I decided to start doing at home workouts on the peloton app. At this point I was going on jogs 2-3x per week and doing home workouts 2-3x per week. I started to feel better physically and mentally. Working out even allowed me to have a more structured day given that I was not working anymore.
July 2020
At this point, I was mid-swing into interview prepping for software engineering internship recruitment season in the fall. This meant going through different patterns in Leetcode-esque questions and doing mock interviews on Pramp. I was also taking 2 classes and making side projects. I had less free time and as a result I started to work out less. I tried to counteract this by doing compound movement workouts like squats, cleans, and deadlifts. I was doing a 1×12, 1×10, 1×8, 1×6 split for those workouts with increasing weights. I usually jumped rope for about 5-10 minutes prior to working out and did some stretching. Post workout, I also stretched and sometimes did a 20 minute yoga session. I also started to move away from jogging as I injured my right knee during one of my workouts.
November 2020
During this month, I was finally done interviewing and was lucky enough to secure an internship! However, my physical fitness suffered. I live with my girlfriend and we usually split the house duties, but during this time, my girlfriend’s company had their busy season, so I was doing more of the duties. With doing this, all of the interviews and keeping up with school, I had neglected working out from the end of August to the start of November. As much as I wanted to feel bad for again being consistent and then neglecting working out, I tried to reason with myself that life happens. Prioritizing things like career progress and significant other support were more important to me at the time. This month was also my birthday month, anniversary celebration, and Thanksgiving. This meant taking time off and eating great food 🙂 . This meant less time to workout and more caloric intake of course. During this month I attempted to start working out again by doing some cardio days and light weight lifting days. For cardio, I mainly did Fartlek runs and recovery runs. For light weight lifting, I did Chest/Triceps, Back/Biceps, Shoulders/Traps, and legs splits with low weight and higher repetitions.
December 2020
The start of December was great! I had been working out consistently for about 1 month. I started to feel good again like I did during the summer. I decided to switch my workout types from cardio and light weights to heavy weights and fun cardio. For my lifting sessions, I did 2×8 warm ups and 2×6 increased weight and 1×4 70% of personal record weight. My fun cardio was biking around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. During one of the biking sessions, it rained super hard and somehow a couple of days later I got the flu. Not saying rain causes sickness, but it is weird how I got sick suddenly. This derailed my workout plans and my holiday plans. It was the end of the year and I had again stopped working out. I was sitting on my couch, sipping on some Theraflu, and thinking “when will I be able to workout and not have something come up”. It’s safe to say I was frustrated, but luckily I knew this had always been part of my life. You go forward 2 steps and take a step back. But, regardless, we keep moving forward.
Conclusion
Overall, you all can see that my fitness journey was very much affected by what was going on in my life. I definitely put it in the back seat whenever I had to take on more responsibilities or when I became ill. What I don’t show here is how frustrating it can be to start and stop over and over again. In the next blog, I will be going over 2021 and you will see how this has continued to happen. My workouts changed significantly and I began to enjoy learning new workouts and adopting/unadopting a new hobby; running!
