Get to the Gym For Your Wellbeing

Now that those shiny gym doors have finally reopened, exercise will either feel like your personal saviour, perhaps from the pending insanity that awaited you in isolation, or your personal nightmare after walking to the fridge became your main form of daily exercise.

Either way, you know in your heart of hearts that kicking back into gear through exercise is going to do a world of good. Time to move forward, no need to look back.

But don’t guilt trip yourself for taking more time than others to jump back on that horsey if that is your truth. Society has been put through the ringer recently and likely so have you, so take things in your own stride.

There’s no giant step that does it. It’s a lot of little steps.

If you are unmotivated or down in the dumps, know that you’re only human and that ongoing isolation and inactivity is not conducive to living the dream.

But when you’re ready there are finally options that are legally available to you that can help break this cycle.

No matter how much your inner child is kicking and screaming at the idea, one of those options is getting yourself to the gym – because completing a challenge for the sake of good health is rewarding and uplifting. You know this!

According to Sydney-based clinical psychologist, Georgia MacNevin: “Isolation plays a big role in mental health issues… and many strategies that people use to manage their mental health are linked to social connection, community engagement and getting out and about.”

If you struggled with the sudden and abrupt abolition of all social activities and face-to-face interactions during the truly bizarre and historically unseen era of iso – during what we can only pray was the peak of the COVID-19 shitstorm that continues to drizzle on our parade – you’re certainly not alone.

That immediate and extensive loss of community and social engagement may have only exacerbated the struggles inflicted by the COVID-19 crisis.

If life in iso just felt somewhat incomplete or lost in limbo, getting to the gym could be one of the best antidotes to the post-lockdown blues, but it is beneficial to go beyond the body through a more holistic approach to exercise, living and feeling better,

Kudos to those that exercised consistently during this time, or did their best to stay active at home. It wasn’t easy, even our Stepz Fitness trainers struggled to keep fit.

Either way, we’ve all spent more time sitting at home and twiddling our thumbs than we ever signed up for, while basking in a higher gradient of anxiety than we’re accustomed to – awaiting our next escape from the prison that became our homes to go grocery shopping like it was a cherished pastime.

COVID-19 made us the biggest pack of losers in human history. We resorted to the screens of our devices to throw the worst birthday parties of all time for our loved ones, or to get digitally drunk with our equally bored mates, probably via a Zoom meeting or something terrible like that.

A lot of us didn’t have an option but to embrace nek level laziness and basically render ourselves immobile house cats by default.

According to Ms MacNevin, some people might have experienced isolation as “a great time to slow down and focus on self healing, while others might have struggled with social distancing or developing new strategies to adjust to disconnection.”

We all became submerged to varying degrees in the fog of inactivity, confinement and social disconnection, meaning we might have fallen out of rhythm with our pre-lockdown selves – or the ways we maintained greater clarity in our daily lives.

If this sounds familiar to your experience or resonates with your headspace, it might be an ideal or essential time to reconnect with that vibrant community waiting for you at your local gym – where people bind together through their shared commonalities in practicing self-care and good health.

If you were one of the countless couch potatoes that relished in the excuse to be as unphysical as Fat Bastard during lockdown, applaud yourself. There won’t be many opportunities in life to be pathetic by law, without even having work as a requirement to leave the house.

But now that this months-long Netflix marathon is coming to a close and our retinas are slightly fried from constant exposure to blue light, there’s nothing left for us to watch or rewatch without forking out a payment for a new subscription.

This is most certainly the time for us to stop taking the piss. It’s time to invest that money in a gym membership that’s going to augment our happiness, endorphins and hopefully lift us out of the fog isolation bring. It’s been great.

But we now need to mitigate against our beer, wine and Ubereats bellies via exercise, to ensure we can still see our genitals from a standing position in our middle age and preferably till our dying day – although old age offers no guarantees.

It’s time to stand together and declare that we are no longer slabs of Velcro covered in pie crumbs, attached to our now stained living room sofa, and kick ourselves into gear.  Any gear will do at this stage, any gear at all, neutral doesn’t work for us in phase 3 guys.

We just need to relearn certain phrases like ‘pushup’ or ‘cardio’ and other ancient pagan lingo that has been lost on the masses.

It’s also time to say no more to being alarm-snoozers and progress beyond our stereotypical Australianism, which led the government to cap daily purchases of grog in iso to an amount that would kill a family of horses – which is far less likely to discourage alcoholism in our longneck-throwing nation.

Surely the idea of actually doing something, anything at all that does not involve 5G, will at least be a nice break from absolutely nothing. Let’s face it, if iso were to continue who knows what kind of lows we might sink to in our indenting furniture.

Some of us may have been at risk of traversing into delusion and becoming shower-every-two-days kinda people – I’m talking path of no return behaviour.

So look, we may still be processing what we became in iso and appear flabbier than perhaps ever before – which is fine, it’s so fine… we may have thrown a burrito at our own reflections before sobbing on all fours and eating it off the carpet, but everything is fine.

The key is to harness the energy from that teensie bit of self-loathing and channel it into physical exertion.

Fear not the sea of overpriced activewear that you can no longer afford, or whether you might bump flab against one of those sparkling gym hotties, who of course maintained their plant-based diet and weekday sobriety in iso, and would somehow remain flabless regardless.

I guarantee that even the most genetically blessed and skilled attendee of that advanced Pilates class you farted in and failed to complete – who seems so together like a walking self-help book that you want to read and make out with simultaneously, while decoding your childhood traumas that are making you envy the fabric of their existence – are also feeling like Fat Bastards despite their winter bikini bodies literally being runway ready for Victoria’s Secret.

We must learn how to move at a non-glacial pace again and try not to tear a muscle or fall asleep in the toilet cubicle, after coming to the conclusion that exercise is too hard and lacking the willpower to vacate the building.

Getting to the gym can feel like a mission and a half, but it will be transformative to your mental and physical well-being, and allow you to re-emerge into the real world and spread those toned wings that your Momma (and exercise) gave you.

To make things even easier the team at Stepz Fitness are offering a special discount to help you step out of iso. $1 per day for 30 days is all it will take to step out of iso and improve your wellness. Register here