Some people have expressed doubt when i say that I am not an athlete. I am not. I used to box when I was younger, more than 20 years ago. I stopped boxing when I embraced Islam, believing it to be prohibited.
After I married and had children, I stopped exercising altogether, gained weight, and neglected my health; drinking coffee and eating cookies all day at work, and eating too much rice and meat at home.
In prison, I suffered injuries to my shoulders, arms and legs as a result of torture. In the early years of my imprisonment, we had regular access to the courtyard and I began to train, little by little, to prepare myself for escaping. I was already in my late thirties.
After my failed escape attempt, I was tortured again, and spent several months in solitary confinement. I renewed my efforts to get fit, eventually doing a thousand push-ups every day; and I made use of the sparse diet in solitary, losing several kilograms of fat; all the while, planning again to escape.
Once I was returned to the regular prison, my legs were shackled for months, and I was banned from any type of exercise because I had beaten several police in my escape attempt.
The fitness gains I made in solitary confinement were lost. It was not until my last year in prison that I was able to begin to exercise again, though i had to do it secretly. When everyone was asleep, I would do push-ups and sit-ups in my cell, go to the toilet to jog in place, and so on.
Eventually, I was allowed to exercise in the courtyard again, though access was extremely limited. Sometimes the police would open the yard for only a few minutes, other times they wouldn’t open it at all. But even if it was just 10 minutes, I would train as hard as I could. I would run, do body weight exercises, HIIT, and gymnastic conditioning on the concrete as intensely as possible for whatever time they would give us. Because, yes, at that time, I was still intending to escape again, and I wanted to be unstoppable.
That is how I got in shape. It was only around 3 years ago, beginning when i was about 41 years old. So, no, I am not an athlete, and I have not been training all my life.
If I can do it, you can do it.
#لياقة_الصراع
#التكيف_البدني
#conflict_fitness