"SEC-S25W1: Full Body Focus"

Greetings everyone and welcome to another season of the learning challenge and I am glad to be a part of this season. The last season was challenging and interesting and here we go again. I want to thank @ngoenyi for the push to take care of our body through exercising. Let’s dive in to this week’s exercise.

Carry out all programs on the table below. They can be done in one day for the purpose of this challenge but it is recommended that the programs be spread for at least, 3 days in a week for maximum benefits. Explain how you achieved each of the individual programs.

For this weeks challenge, I carried out all the exercise as tabulated below;

Week 1 Focus	Programs	Duration/Reps
Full Body Focus	Warm-up (jogging in place)	5minutes
~	Dumbbell squats	3 sets of 10reps
~	push-ups	3 sets of 10 reps (beginners)
~	Dumbbell Bent-over Rows	3 sets of 10reps
~	plank	3 sets of 20 seconds
~	cool down	5 minutes stretching major muscle groups

First I started with a warm up exercise and I did jogging on the spot. The essence of this warmup exercise is to get our body ready for the strain it’s going to go through. It’s like a resetting for our body and getting in tune to be adapt to the entire excercise process. I did jogging on the spot for about five minutes. It wasn’t an easy experience to start with. At a point I felt it would have been easier if I was not on a spot. Maybe actual jogging and moving a distance would have been easier as my calves and the tip of my toes felt some strain from the jogging.

I did all the exercises as in the video below and these are the explanations of the exercises.

The Exercise video

I had to rest a little to catch my breath before I proceeded to the next exercise which was dumbbell squats. I didn’t have an actual dumbbell so I had to improvise by filling two bottle with water as instructed to use as my dumbbell. I held the two one on each hand as I proceeded with my squats. I did ten squats for each set and I did three repetitions. The squats impacted my hips region as I felt pain trying to do the squats and stand with my two hands by my side on the improvised dumbbells. The pains disappeared after the exercise though.

After this I went for the push ups. Push-ups has never been easy for me anytime and I had to go for the beginners. I thought it was going to be easy but on the second repetition, my shoulder and chest regions were already feeling the strain from the bending forward with my knees in the ground. I did push-up for beginners. Ten set for three repetitions. By the time I got to the last ten sets, hmmm, my arms were already crying for help. I wonder how it would have been if it wasn’t beginners. As I wrote this, my arms and shoulders and chest region is still paining me. I guess it would stop as I continue with the exercising. Of all the excercises, this was the most difficult and most painful for me.

Dumbbell Bent-over Rows were easier than the dumbbell squats. With my dumbbells on my two hands, I bent forward and did the rows with my two hands up and down. I did three set of ten repetitions for each set. The impact was on my arms and waist because of the position I took and having to lift my arms up and down.

The next was the plank. The planks initially wasn’t difficult at least for the first set but by the time I got to the third set, my arms and legs were already beginning to shake but I was able to sustain the the plank until the second seconds was finished. I was counting off the seconds in my mind.

At the end of the exercises, I went ahead to do my stretches. I had to stretch major parts of my body. I did the arm stretch, neck and back stretch. I also did the leg stretches both front and back and also my waist. All the stretches were targeted on the major areas so as to help relieve the impact of the exercise strain on those parts of the body.