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How do you stay healthy and fit? Konstantina Drakou shares her experience

'TFD (The First Drop) logo on fitness bag' photo (c) 2009, Pete Bellis - license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/My dear readers, hello! I missed you so much! Sorry I disappeared again. I've enjoyed a very intense feast period in my work, plus Easter is coming, and my daughter's birthday falls on Easter this year! So I've been preparing a special holiday for her. But I am happy to be back with you and I am bringing a wonderful guest post by Konstantina Drakou about staying fit and healthy as a freelancer. I love Konstantina's way of keeping fit. Wonder how she does that? Then keep reading :)

Like all other professionals chained on a chair, translators tend to spend endless hours without moving a muscle. They type, click, type, click! During periods of feast, I tend to spend more than sometimes 12 hours sitting and typing, checking and clicking. As it is expected after so many hours of being in the same position and most of the time in a wrong and harmful posture, pain starts to make its presence noticeable on the shoulders, the back and neck. I also caught myself eating more, and I am not a great fan of eating. I started thinking about doing some exercise, but then again, I do not really enjoy gyms. Then, I looked back in the years of innocence, and asked myself what I used to enjoy dong in my spare time that included exercise. DANCING!

BALLET DAY ONE


I found a ballet dance studio near where I live, called the school to find out if they have adult ballet dance classes: BINGO! The first lesson was just around the corner, when I felt intimidated by the thought that I would probably be in the same class with other more experienced dancers than me. I had stopped dancing so very many years ago. Picking up the pieces of my long lost dance confidence, I tied my ballet shoes and entered the hall. To my surprise, I met ladies of my ages, mothers that needed to escape for their routine and I suddenly felt at home. The first couple of lessons were hard, the exercises difficult to apply. The first time I bent my back slightly backwards, my spine made a noise that should be followed by extreme pain, on the contrary, it left that all my vertebrae were finally in place. My body felt light and relaxed. I have been dancing three times a week since then.

GET FIT WITHOUT REALIZING IT


What is magical about dancing is the fact that my body gets the exercise needed without even realizing it because I actually am having fun while doing it. The duration of each class is around 1 ½ hours but time flies so quickly that I am always craving for more. I could probably spend endless hours without looking at the clock in the hall. While dancing, the memory card of my hard drive (head) resets and cleans itself from all the work I have done (or not done) during the day so everything is forgotten: the proofreading of an amateur translation, the famine period, Trados Editor crushing! All is lost in thin air. What seem to be more important are the smooth movements and the sound of the classical music!

STRONG BODY, STRONG MIND


Now I see sense in Hippocrates’ words: a strong mind requires a strong body. My dance classes are sacred to me. In cases when I have so much work that I should in fact be forced to skip the class, I prefer to work an hour or two more after class than work during it. Dancing is after a while a daily routine that I simply could not live without. It does me good, I see it in practice: back pains, shoulder pains and neck pains are all miraculously gone!

If you, like me, do not enjoy gyms or any other aerobic exercises, then why don’t you consider joining a dance course? There are different genres of dancing out there apart from classical ballet: jazz, street jazz, zumba, traditional, modern! Put your dancing shoes on and dance like no one is watching!

Dear Konstantina, thank you once again for sharing your experience! Keep up the good work!
 
Konstantina Drakou has been a full-time freelance translator since 2007and owner of Wordyrama Translations. She translates from English, German and Swedish to Greek and specializes in IT, Localization and Technical texts. You may follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook



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