I have a confession to make: I’ve never been athletic. Ever.

I was the kid no one wanted on their team. I think the only reason I ever played any kind of sport during recess was because a friend of mine insisted that everyone let me play and not tell me how much I suck. I must admit it wasn’t very fun. No one likes to do something when you know everyone around you is secretly frustrated with you, perhaps even hating having you around.

As a teen, I enjoyed jogging. I felt like I could run everywhere! But I wasn’t so good that the track team was calling to me (I also hate sports, and turning a hobby into a competition wasn’t to my tastes), and I can’t sprint to save myself to boot.

All in all, I just couldn’t find a way to really get in shape and stay in shape. I wasn’t looking very hard, though. I was always naturally slim (at least as a kid) and strangely strong for my age and small size. I could easily outperform my peers in strength!

Then I hit my 20s. The family dynamic changed and my weight with it. My brother had fallen into the depression that plagues our family, creeping into every nook and crevice in our brains. His solution: dessert every night!

This was fine for him. Somehow, his skinny genes manage to out-perform mine. He sleeps most of the day and only runs on a treadmill in the basement at night, yet he’s built like Jack Skellington.

I, on the other hand, began to slowly swell. It was slow, but it was steady. For the first time in my life, I noticed I was getting a belly, and I hated it.

I was eating wrong, snacking too often, and my new job kept me sitting in front of the computer for too long. I was sedentary now, and my body couldn’t deal with it.

First Attempt to Get in Shape

Bike riding! I have a deep fondness for bike riding and rowing around the lake in my little inflatable boat, which I managed to buy from Walmart for only $25. It’s not durable, but it’s enjoyable.

Bike riding was where it was at, though. I didn’t have to drive to a lake and hope that all the fishermen in Minnesota weren’t taking up all the parking. I live in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and I can’t get my truck down to any of them during tourist season!

Minnesota is filled to the brim with bike trails, though. In fact, we apparently have more bike trails than any other state, so there’s no excuse for not being able to bike. Even in my rural area with a population of fewer than 400 people, there are bike trails aplenty.

I got addicted to it. I felt like I had to take a ride, even just a short one, every day for my own well-being. I would listen to music, learn Japanese or some other language through podcasts, or just listening to sentences I’d mined or audiobooks I could mostly understand; and I could think in silence. The sounds of rustling leaves, scurrying chipmunks, and singing birds would wash over me, and the rest of the day would slink away where it couldn’t trouble me at all.

Unfortunately, two things got in the way: winter and my mom.

Winter is obviously a problem, especially in a northern state that manages to win the Icebox Award frequently. I could usually make myself ride as long as there wasn’t snow, for once it starts snowing here, it’ll never leave until spring, which comes far later than in many other places.

The winter proved to me how addicted I was to biking, and I felt like I was going crazy being away from my precious bike trail. It didn’t help that I’d managed to really trim down over the summer and found myself starting to put on some pounds again as winter, and all those delicious holidays that come with it, settled in.

I was also living with my mother at this time, and she has a tendency to view any recreational activity that isn’t improving the home or yard to be a form of laziness. She was growing extremely frustrated with my hour-long bike rides every day when the yard needed upkeeping. She’s not as bad now, but in those days it was hard to maintain a hobby.

The Second Attempt – Trying to Conquer the Winter Problem

Another sibling was getting in shape after teetering on the edge between overweight and obese. His story is part of the reason why I’m actually anti-psychiatry, or at least in the critical psychiatry camp.

He was a difficult child who was born at that unfortunate time when every kid was being diagnosed with ADHD. If you had a problematic child, it was probably that and something like Risperadol was prescribed.

The problem with that drug is that it’s basically a legal form of the very illegal drug speed. This caused his moods to get out of whack. He was hallucinating, developing strange phobias, and struggling to keep it together. All of these things are known side effects of the drug, but that didn’t stop “doctors” from diagnosing him next as bipolar, claiming that the drugs hadn’t caused the symptoms, they’d merely brought them to the surface.

Even if that were the case, and science says it’s not, then wouldn’t that still be a bad thing? He wasn’t having these problems before, after all.

The unfortunate result of that was a prescription of multiple drugs. Atypical antipsychotics, which should be done away with entirely, and a host of medications to handle the side effects seemed to destroy what was left of him, mentally. His personality changed for the worse and his weight gain was uncontrollable.

He finally took charge of his own healthcare and got off all of his meds. He was ultimately diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (I suppose the spectrum is the new trend) and he’s doing much, much better now.

Unfortunately, the weight still stuck. The medications had taken their toll on his body, and he was determined to change that.

He bought just about every piece of gym equipment he could cram into his apartment. My phone was constantly going off with text after text about how many reps he was doing and of what exercise. He also started running in the annual 5K and even boasted that his picture was in the local paper, which was covering the race.

When he invited me over to work out with him, I was overjoyed. As a beginner, I wasn’t ready for the intense workouts he was doing, and he didn’t really want to tone it down for me.

The only solution was to get my own gym equipment.

There aren’t many gyms around me; at least none that would justice the gas expenditure. I also couldn’t afford a trainer, but through my brother, I’d learned how to safely use the equipment.

Then the cost of the equipment set in. So many things to buy, for so many things are only for a few workouts! There were things just for arms and things just for legs and things just for abs.

I dabbled in bodyweight training, which is where your own body is the weight and resistance, and while I now like it very much, back then I was just heavy enough to where some exercises were too difficult and others made me tire too easily.

Attempt Three – When I Found the Solution

Is this the part you were looking for as you skimmed my article? Well, here it is. I finally managed to overcome the winter problem, the cost problem, and the fact that I was too fat to do even bodyweight exercises with resistance bands and kettlebells.

It began with exercise bands because they were cheap. For just a few bucks, I could get some flimsy piece of rubber (this wasn’t some high-end one I’d bought) and work my arms, legs, and core. By wrapping the band around my foot and looping the other end over the bar on the clothesline pole, I could even manage a pull-up!

I was enjoying my band, but I wanted to add something else. My cheap resistance bands were rapidly losing their elasticity, but I still wasn’t sitting well financially enough to get gym equipment.

That’s when I discovered kettlebells. At first, they intimidated me. I have a bizarre fear of anything that I think could break my teeth if it hit my face. They also looked weird, like something that should be fired from a cannon instead of swung around. I took a chance and bought two of them. They weren’t heavy ones (15 pounds only), but I figured they would provide similar resistance as my bands.

I fell in love.

The bands are great for activating your body’s natural stabilizers, and when it came to reaching to pull something heavy off a shelf, I found myself being able to do it with ease. Kettlebells, on the other hand, made me feel like my workouts had more versatility.

It’s a strange thing to say, as kettlebells should be clunky and bands should be able to do just about anything. Both provide full-body workouts, but they do it in different ways.

Kettlebells have an isotonic contraction, meaning that the level of resistance stays the same. Meanwhile, resistance bands have an isokinetic contraction, meaning that the level of resistance grows stronger the more the band is stretched.

When I did squats with the band, the resistance got pretty tough as I neared the standing position. However, I feel that this helped me tremendously when I began doing squats with kettlebells. My core was stronger.

Even better, they didn’t take up much space. I could stash them away beneath the basement stairs or in a closet and go about my day without tripping on them.

The Future?

One day, when I have more money, I want to buy two things: a Kat VR gaming treadmill and an ebove B/01 VR bike.

The Kat VR treadmill is, in my opinion, the best of all the gaming treadmills on the market right now. The point of these is to create more immersive gaming experiences by allowing you to literally walk around the virtual environment instead of just pushing an analog stick.

VR is moving forward at an incredible pace (that’s for another article) including haptic technology, but for someone who lives in a cold climate, such advances could also provide a way to continue walks during the cold months.

My goal is to walk from one end of Skyrim (or Cyradil or Morrowind), maybe jogging, and, of course, fighting off monsters and ruffians. What a cool workout!

The ebove B/01 bike is a VR bike that seeks to make indoor peddling an actually enjoyable experience. The bike also serves as a kind of motion machine, if anyone knows of those cinematic experiences where the chairs move.

Seeing as how I love bike riding so much, it would be great to be able to continue doing these things in the winter!

What Do You Do?

Anyone got a favorite workout or fitness story you’d like to share? Sound off in the comments!

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