October’s End

Hi, friends! I’ve been settling back into normal life after our visit to the UK.

One thing that I’m tweaking at the moment is my workout schedule. About three quarters of the way through the six-week-long workplace exercise challenge I realized something: my anxiety levels had gone way, way down. As you can imagine, this made me very happy/excited – but I also knew that getting out and walking two-and-a-half to three hours a day would just not be sustainable for me, even if it did have this amazing effect on my anxiety. So, I’ve been messing around with the intensity of my workouts. Instead of just walking, I’ve been adding a 20-30 minute workout on the stair-climber machine at our gym. Two things I like about using this machine – 1) it pairs with my Apple Watch so I can see my heart rate on the monitor screen, and 2) I can therefore easily make these sessions into HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts by increasing and decreasing the speed of the steps over the course of the workout. I’m also continuing to walk, but the overall time I’ve been spending on my entire exercise session is about 1hour to 1 hour 15 minutes. Something I can definitely fit into my day (I’m also back to three days a week strength training, which I am able quickly accomplish after work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays).

So far this decrease in time while increasing intensity seems to be working. However, I am finding that if I want the results to be apparent every day, I need to work out every day. No days off. Which is a bit of a bummer, but definitely worth it to me.

All of the photos in today’s post were taken with my new iPhone. I’m still getting used to the new phone (I’m definitely a creature of habit and not a huge fan of change) and have had to adjust some of the settings in order to have the photos transfer to my laptop full size, but I’m looking forward to figuring it out some more.

Happy Halloween, and I’ll see you back here soon!

Love,

Michelle xoxo