There are so many sides to the New Year resolutions thing. You could see it as a way to improve yourself or as completely useless. There are plenty of reasons to have New Year’s resolutions. This year, I decided I wanted to work out for the first month of January to see the effect it had on me. 

For the first couple of days, it sucked. I was sore from all the different types of workouts I was trying. After the first week of working out, I found myself hurting less and being able to push myself longer. 

I realized even after a short period of physical activity, I felt better. I wasn’t as tired as I normally was. Working out gave me more strength for the different things I was doing in musical theater. I found that not only was I quickly seeing certain changes in how I felt, but I also realized that it helped me with all the practice for musical theater because physical activity and singing at the same time are hard to do. 

Throughout the three weeks that I worked out for this challenge, I noticed that my mental health was doing better, too. I felt happier and wanted to get up in the morning. I spent more time outside instead of sitting in my dark room. Just by getting out and being active, I was mentally feeling better and feeling less sad. By being active, my friends and family saw a part of me that they hadn’t seen in me in a while due to depression.

I found that when I was being active, I had the inclination to do more and was more productive. I found that I got more stuff done when I was running. I never knew that running and working on homework would do something for me. I was really surprised to find I was more focused and got my work done faster. Overall, just doing active stuff boosted my productivity, something I would have never expected. 

During the time I was working out, I felt less yucky in general. I felt less sick or less chronically tired. I’m used to being at least semi-sick once a month. This month I did not feel sick at all. I have tried many things to stop this from happening and nothing has worked until I tried working out. Through exercise, I found myself wanting to eat better than I typically would, and it was an interesting change.

There were tons of pros to working out, these are just a few. Yes, there were some cons, too. The pros in my opinion completely outweighed the cons. Overall working out did a lot to help me. 

Working out did way more for me than I ever thought it would. I was super impressed. I liked this experiment I did and instead of just stopping now that the experiment is over, I decided that I am going to continue exercising.