Why I will always be grateful for PE with Joe Wicks

Lockdown could have gone one of two ways for me.  I could have gone into a horrible cycle of eating, eating and more eating to try and help fill the void that life had left along with a lot of time spent wallowing on the sofa.  Or I could have found a new found fondness for exercise. But surely the latter wouldn’t happen as exercise and I don’t get on, do we?

It is fair to say that exercise and I have had a rocky relationship at best over the years.  I was never what you would call sporty and if I am honest, I am quite lazy. If I had the choice between doing something active and something passive, the latter would always win.

I have tried to keep fit in different ways over the years with varying degrees of success and then about five years ago, I started to have pain in my lower back which at times could be quite sore and made any sort of exercise painful.  As far as I was concerned this was my get of exercise free card and I used it to my hearts content.  As a result, I gained weight and became a lot more lethargic than I liked.  But it is easy to fall into bad ways and not so easy to get out of them.

Having said that, efforts had been made. I had started this year lighter thanks to following a 16:8 diet.  I was also doing lots of walks with our dog, which was really positive but if you had told me in March that I would be exercising several times a week during lockdown, I would have laughed.  Hysterically.

Lockdown began and I was concerned that my daughter, who has sadly inherited my sedate tendencies, would do very little, so I enthusiastically talked her into doing the Joe Wicks PE lessons every morning.

To begin with, we both found it difficult.  We groaned a lot but there was something quite infectious about Joe Wicks and that made it a great way to start our ‘school day’. My back seemed no more painful than usual and before long we were getting up to do PE every week day and I started to quite enjoy it.  That’s the thing with exercise, it can be hard to motivate yourself to do it, but you feel so much better when you have done it.

After a few weeks, a neighbour started doing socially distanced pilates classed in a grassy area right in front of our house.  Had I not been doing the Joe Wicks workouts, I would never have agreed to join the pilates class.  My daughter and I also started doing the Couch to 5K app and even though we are ambling through this at our own pace, we are still going with it several weeks later.

Suddenly, I found myself doing exercise nearly every day, somedays twice a day.  The Joe Wicks PE lessons started to get harder and I was getting used to waking up most mornings to find myself with a new aching muscle.  I think I may have discovered muscles I never ever knew I had.

But I was loving it.  I really had found a newfound fondness for exercise. I have a huge respect for Joe Wicks and what he did during lockdown and I have read lots of stories similar to mine on his social media accounts of people who have discovered or rediscovered a love of exercise thanks to his PE lessons.  And it is easy to see why.  The sessions are fun, engaging, motivating and really do give you a good workout every time.  Not only that, they are completely free and even now the live PE lessons have finished, I go back and revisit some of my favourites and I have even tried a few of the Body Coach workouts.

We loved seeing his family on screen and felt sad when he did his final PE lesson last week with his family.  He became the nation’s PE teacher, if not the world’s.  But the important thing is how many people like me he inspired and I will certainly be grateful to his PE sessions as I feel so much better and fitter after lockdown than I had done for quite a long time. And not just physically, but mentally too.  Doing the exercise sessions  helped me to not feel so anxious about the pandemic and less worried about what would happen if I caught the virus.

It was also something that my daughter and I did together, we smiled, laughed, moaned, groaned and worked out together and that made it even more special. Our commitment to the sessions also inspired my son and husband to try some of Joe’s HIT workouts too.

The important thing now is to keep it going and I know that in September, when work finally returns, I will find it harder but with some of his workouts being 7 and 10 minutes long, even at the end of a long day, I am still going to try and find time to do something as I know I will feel so much better for it, both physically and mentally.