2020 Workout Review

I think we can all agree 2020 didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. The past nine months of 2020 were spent in quarantine, events cancelled or pushed until 2021, and restaurants, bars, shops and barbershops were all closed through most of the summer. We spent a lot more time at home. More time cooking meals. We even tried to get outside as much as possible to get a change of scenery from our at home offices. Camping became the new vacation plans for the year and it seemed like everyone else had the same idea.

While our lives were turned upside down by Covid, it did bring the opportunity to focus on eating healthier and working out after a long day at work. Cutting out the commute time from home to the office and back to just going between the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen made a huge difference. I spent more time making healthy plant based meals and our evenings were spent setting aside 20 – 30 minutes a night working out. These two changes in my routine drastically changed the way I felt, the way I looked, and the confidence I have built because of it. Alex and I made a conscious choice to push each other to work out and not gain weight from being at home 24/7 and the snacking that came along with it. Excuses as to why we weren’t going to workout on a specific night became harder to make.

I haven’t ran the data yet (planning on doing this later today before posting), but I do have a feeling I worked out more this year than I did when I had a gym available last year. I don’t think I ran as much, but I learned how to make at-home workouts my main priority. Focusing on the whole body – arms, legs, booty, abs, and even my heart through HIIT and cardio workouts.

This year I learned that excuses won’t give me the results I want to see. Instead, I realized pushing myself and motivating myself on the days you don’t want to workout will.

Here are some of my general goals for 2021:

I made some time to crunch my data from 2020. I looked at my active vs rest days of 2020 for the whole year first. Second, I broke 2020 down into weeks and compared how many days per week I either worked out or rested.

I also wanted to compare my active vs rest days to my data from 2019. The orange and gray chart on the right shows my active and rest days of 2019 and the teal and gray chart on the left shows the same info, but for 2020.

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Above you can see in 2019 I worked out about 51% of the time and rested about 49% of the days in 2019. In 2020 I worked out about 64% of the time and rested about 36% of the year. Active days are those where I ran or did some sort of full body workout. I am really proud of the progress I made by cutting down my rest days this past year and finding a routine to fit not only my schedule, but also the goals I put forward for myself each month.

There are a few factors I believe aided in this increase of active days from 2019 to 2020. The first is working instead of being in college. In college my schedule was always changing and it made it hard to be consistent with working out. Whereas with a job I am able to maintain a routine of working out at 8pm every night and not worrying about finishing up homework for the next day.

Another factor I think played into my increase in active days is working remotely from home. It makes a huge difference not having to drive to and from the office everyday. With this extra time I’m able to take that 30 min drive time and workout instead. Although these changes have aided in my increased active days during 2020, I do also think I was more motivated to workout and keep my body in good shape. Coupling working out and eating healthy, it has given me a new type of motivation to stay in shape and build muscle.

The second graph I created breaks down active and rest days by each week of 2020. It’s ordered from the weeks where I worked out the most all the way to the days where I rested more days than I worked out. The active days are the bars in teal and the rest days are in gray. From a quick glance it appears I had more active days than rest days per week for most of 2020.

There were about 9 weeks of 2020 where I had more rest days than active ones in a given week. Most of these weeks were early on in the year when I was still in college. I also took a week and a half off when I had my wisdom teeth removed. These are not excuses as to why I didn’t workout, but I also think it’s important to look and understand what was going on during those weeks and make a change for 2021 to turn some of the rest weeks into active ones.

I want to continue increasing my active to rest day ratio in 2021 and push myself for an even higher percentage of active vs rest days. Overall I am really proud of the all I accomplished in 2020 and am so excited to see what 2021 will bring! I bought 10 pound dumbbells and can’t wait to throw these into the mix of workouts in 2021.