This is obvious information of course but as of late I haven't been doing much exercise outside of solo activities such as jogging, walking, riding a bicycle, or weight training here and there.
The other day a slot came up with a squash group that were playing indoors because it is already freezing here, so I jumped in even though I am not good at squash.
A quick little not about the sport squash just in a general sense: I find the sport quite frightening. I don't often get hit in the back by a ball but when it happens on a hard shot, you tend to remember it. I think my overall game suffers because I am always bracing for impact when the ball is struck behind me. I've been told that this is something you just have to get accustomed to and well, maybe I will, maybe I wont.
We played for nearly an hour and my readings from my sport watch were pretty fun.
Burning nearly 500 extra calories doing something that I enjoyed doing was a real change of pace for me. I don't HATE running but sometimes it does get a bit monotonous whereas playing squash had me focusing a lot less on whether or not I was getting near quitting time. In fact, when our hour was up I wanted to play more. I suppose there is always next time.
Here's the bit that I really enjoyed seeing the results for.
That's my heart rate and I would say that this is probably a pretty good and healthy BPM to maintain. I was never in any real danger of entering the highest BPM level but I got close on some of the rallies and it stayed in level 3 or 4 which for calorie burn is considered a "sweet spot." This is true for cardio improvement as well.
The difference between this and my one hour runs is that I didn't ever find myself staring at the clock to see how much longer I needed to keep doing this. The competitive nature of the game kind of took my mind off of that and I just enjoyed playing.
If it wasn't for the fact that this actually costs quite a lot where I live I would probably do it a lot more frequently. This group goes every week and I asked for them to try to include me as much as they can. Paying $15 each for a one-hour session on a court seems really excessive to me but I suppose that is the price that the club can get and they are a business, not a charity. The courts were completely booked up for the day so I can't fault them for charging this since they clearly are capable of getting it.
There aren't a lot of times of year where there are any sort of free sports that can be done here in Chicago. In the summer it is dangerously hot and in the winter it is so cold I question why I continue to live here. We haven't even gotten to the truly miserable time of year as far as weather is concerned either.
It was nice to mix things up and hang out with some friends to play a sport and I am just happy that my cardiovascular fitness was able to cover up any sort of lack in skill that I had on the court. Out of the 4 of us that went today I was definitely the least skilled but i was running circles around everyone else and I guess that kind of leveled the play field.
I think that once somebody loses enough weight to get involved in a competitive sport they should try to do so but choose wisely. There are some people out there that take their sports very seriously and to me that can ruin everything. You do need to get yourself down to a reasonably healthy weight and cardio capability before you take something like this on though. I think that as hard as we were working that some of my overweight friends would really struggle in there.