Couch to 5K | Week 1 | Day 1

Days keep passing me by and still I am not down to my pre-Christmas weight. I really need to step up my game with more exercise. We've joined the gym again, but with S still recovering from his key hole surgery, he can't quite go to the gym yet and make full use out of it. But I still don't want to go to this new gym on my own! I may pluck up the courage this week. After all, I have actually been there before with my old personal trainer - Tyler. Sticking mainly to weights, with a small bit of cardio intervals, I stuck mainly to one area of the gym. Now I've got to reintroduce my body to the concept of exercise, I feel I'll be adventuring round the cardio section a lot more to start off with. A friend told me about this Couch to 5K app that she'd been trying and at first I was sceptical. But with a little research, I soon found out it was actually provided by the NHS. It's a 9 week programme designed to.. well.. its in the title.. get you from the couch to running 5K in just 9 weeks! The plan is very simple, you start off doing intervals and gradually you start running for longer and longer until boom, you've run 5K in one go. That's something I can only dream of at this point as I absolutely hate running and have never really seen the attraction of it. Well, cardio in general has never really appealed to me. I'm much more suited to heavy lifting than sweaty, red faced, out of breath cardio.  So on Monday this week, I finally plucked up the courage, despite having really bad stomach cramps, nausea and a migraine, I went for it and completed day 1 of the Couch to 5K challenge.  It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, and only actually took 20 minutes. It doesn't help that it was about -4 degrees, so breathing in the cold air at such an accelerated rate was painful. The programmes starts off with a 5 minute brisk walk and slowly introduces you into a slow jog. This is just for 60 seconds, so its manageable! You then slow down back to the brisk walk for 90 seconds and so on. You do this 8 times and then do a warm down 5 minute brisk walk.. how simple and easy is that?! You need to do this three times in the first week at the least, to really see the benefits. In the second week you are running for 90 seconds and walking for 2 minutes, in the third you alternate running for 90 seconds, walking for 90 seconds and running for 3 minutes and walking for 3 minutes. In week 4 you are running for between 3 minutes and 5 minutes, and finally ending up running 3.1 miles (5K) in just 30 minutes with a simple warm up brisk walk. There's even a 5k to 10k app to use afterwards if you're feeling daring! It's actually quite a good way of introducing yourself to running if you've not done it before, or if you just want to kick start your fitness regime. You can do this either out on the street or on the treadmill at the gym, whatever suits you better! I'm definitely going to try and keep this up as well as fitting in the gym and other workouts such as yoga. Combined with a healthy diet and lots and lots of water, hopefully this will be the start of the new me and see me fitting into a size 10 again in no time! Have you used the Couch25K app yet? What are your 2016 fitness goals?