Learning challenge s23w4: "I Love My Body /plank shoulder tap and Burpee".

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Hi everyone, it's my pleasure to finally partake in the fitness challenge as I have made several attempts to partake but have issues with recording the video and other times, record but usually make mistakes following the rules of the game and will be retrained from making the post. Once again, I warmly welcome you all to my blog as I finally take on this challenge.

Reading through the challenge, I had to pen down the rules and start practising to the stage of taking the actual exercise. I assumed those times as warming up exercise.

However, I took time to study the two programs presented by the coach, @ngoenyi, in order to understand each of them.

Firstly, the plank with shoulder touch seemed difficult, but when I finally went through it, I got relief that it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

• Exercise1: I started with a warm-up to enable me to go through the programs at a stretch. And then, I positioned myself in a plank position. I started the exercise but noticed that the shoes I was wearing were kind of dragging my feet on the tiled floor, so I had to stop and take off the shoes and start all over again.

And so I positioned myself, placed my two hands on the floor and then began to move them one after another to touch my shoulder by pushing myself up in order for the hands to get to my shoulder. While I did that, I was careful not to raise my back or my buttocks, but simply moved my hands and turned my body a bit in order to where my hands stretch to.

As a teacher, I used my school sports time to engage in exercise. As the students were engaging in a football game, I engaged in bodily exercise. However, I did the plank shoulder touch 3 times of 30 touches each and took a 10-second break for two times, making it 20 seconds before I took the last 10 seconds break to enter the burpees.

• Exercise 2: I engaged in a 10-second break that ushered me into the burpee. I almost forgot how I would go about it but then placed my hands on the floor, pushed myself up and jumped up off my feet on the ground. Then squat down, and stretch myself on the floor again. I repeated these steps five times, took a 10-second break, went back five times and I finally took the last burpees and I ended the exercise.

I think the most difficult for me was the burpees because I almost forgot what to do, but if you ask me about the most strenuous exercise, I'll say it's the plank shoulder touch.

The plank shoulder touch was a bit strenuous because I had to wedge the weight of my body with my toes while moving my hands to my shoulder. That hurt my toes because I took off my shoes.

Apart from that, I also felt pain in both my arms because having to move the hand swiftly strained my arms. Not just that, I also felt pains in my back as well.

I summoned courage and pulled myself through the exercise because my mind was made up to join the exercise. And I have been practising it from the moment I saw the announcement since on Monday. I would say, courage helped me to complete the two exercises and also overcome the difficulties.