Walk At Home Homeschool PE

While dealing with a whacky sciatic nerve and my bum knee I heard about Walk At Home. Have you heard about this cool app? We’ve even adapted this app for walk at home homeschool PE!

I’ve been dealing with a displaced fat pad in my left knee for nearly nine years now. It’s more of a bother than a pain these days, as long as I treat it right. I had a set back last summer and it was really depressing to find that I couldn’t do my daily workout routine which was often a long morning walk. I’d already given up running thanks to my wonky knee and giving up my morning walks was a depressing thought.

Walk at Home Homeschool PE

So the awesome walk tapes that Leslie Sansone produced in the 90’s {and maybe before…} as well as her new workouts are all accessible through her Your Daily Walk website or in app format.

I got really excited about this because it meant I could walk! If my knee was in a fit of rage or my sciatic seized up I could push pause and heal my body. It was like this great big amazingly insane light bulb went on above my head to be honest and I got really really giddy.

You pay $5 per month {USD} and you get a full month’s worth of workouts! All planned out and ready to roll. When I first started out, I was kinda scared because I was feeling really sloth like and was worried I’d struggle with the workouts. But the very first workout captivated me. It was fun and the people working out were laughing at themselves just as much as I was laughing at myself.

The workouts all vary both in length of time and in mileage. Most months there’s a great mix too which means you can pick and choose. Find a workout you loved and want to do a lot? Run with it because you totally can. I did that! I was having some pain in my sciatic which I was told came from tight hip and leg muscles. One month there was this awesome 10 minute walk that was a lot of slow movements and stretching. I loved it. So I’d pull it up often when I felt those muscles of mine starting to tighten up.

I have absolutely loved using this app for the past 9 months. My eldest has taken to working out with me daily too. When the winter months set in around us and the dark mornings were suffocating any idea of an outdoor walk, I wasn’t in a panic like I’d normally be. I dragged my husband out of bed and encouraged him to walk with me. We laughed ourselves through some pretty dreary early morning hours. When my husband’s work schedule got whacky I found my eldest in the lounge room one morning on the sofa.

He watched me for about two minutes and said, “wait I have to try this!” He was captivated by one of the crazy dance workouts. To be honest, those are my least favourite workouts, but they speak loudly to my son, so I throw myself around and pretend that I totally know what I’m doing while waving my hands in the air screaming things like, “This is so weird!!” while he replies with, “What? This is so awesome!”

My eldest was diagnosed two years ago with sports induced asthma. After some dietary changes he found he was having less attacks and wanted to spend time working on activities that would help strengthen his lungs. This has that very mark and he’s earning his PE credit for high school too. Talk about a win-win, or is it a win-win-win?

Some of our very favorite workouts are from the latest workouts, The Miracle Miles. We don’t own the Miracle Mile bands, but pull out our own stretch bands from various PT visits or previous workout DVDS and use those in it’s place.

How We Use Walk at Home Homeschool PE

So really, the app is pretty straight forward. If you go to Leslie’s website walkathome.com you can sign up there for an app subscription. Then download the free app on your smart phone or tablet. You are up and running!

We are a big Mac family. My husband was a Mac lover well before I met him and he easily swooned me over to the “other” side. Why do I mention this? Because I have the app on my iPhone and from there I can use Mirror Play to our Apple TV to workout. Yep, my son and I take Leslie’s advice to heart, we throw that coffee table out of the way, move bean bags and slide the second sofa to the other side of the room giving ourselves the luxury of the whole room and the big screen.

To be honest, when I first signed up I followed the workouts that very first month exactly as they were laid out. I was dutiful and determined both for the sake of having paid for it and the hope of losing excess pounds that having a displaced fat pad has helped me pack on.

In my second month I found a few videos from older DVDs that I wanted to skip because I preferred some of the more modern walks. So I did. I might have felt guilty at first, but I quickly got over that aspect of insanity.

One month I set a mileage goal. It was a pretty crazy goal, but I’d read a success story from the Walk At Home Facebook page about a lady who’d lost an amazing amount of weight and she’d done so by walking 3 miles each day and 4 or 5 miles on the weekend. That sounded totally doable and I set the goal for myself for that month. It WAS doable, but because the app wasn’t designed for that exact purpose it did mean I was doing some of the same workouts over and over again.

Last month there were a LOT of LONGER walks. There were 4 and 5 milers. I kinda groaned when the new calendar came up, but my boy and I quickly fell in love with those longer walks, the ease at hitting our 10,000 steps a day and all the benefits that came with it. Imagine our surprise when this month’s calendar came around and there were more shorter than longer walks!

What I Love About Walk At Home Homeschool PE

• One of the biggest loves I have about this app is the freshness of each workout. You rarely see the same workout in a month! If you can easily get bored with doing the same old thing, like myself, you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised. Yes, all the moves are the same, but the music, the workouts and the people in them change. That means new stories, new jokes and new giggles.
• I love how receptive the people behind the app are. When I first joined up I’d be locked out of the app for 24 hours because the time change didn’t happen in the USA but had happened in AU to be in a new month. That really bugged me. I dropped a line to them about it and they updated it so that the time change happened sooner, sadly that time zone wasn’t right for me either, so hubby sent them info about which time zone to bump it to so that it shouldn’t be an issue for any of their users. The next month, problem solved!
• I have an answer if my kids are sleeping in the lounge room, which they do every Friday night. If I want to workout anyway instead of attempting my crazy workout moves over their mattresses I can just bring up the YourDailyWalk.com website and easily bring up the daily workout there. Problem solved, because let’s face it unless you want to take that walkout to the beach it’s unlikely you’re going to enjoy watching a small screen like your phone for a 10-89 minute workout.
• I love that even if it’s raining out we can still get our daily walk in. I’m one of those insanely weird people who is not fully awake until she’s had her morning walk. I use to get up early to walk before my kids got up and it was always really hard in those dark winter months! This would have been the perfect solution many moons ago.
• I love that my asthmatic teen loves these workouts. I’m grossly aware of just how few years he’ll be at home and I love that I can cherish one more thing with him. I’m not sure he entirely cherishes my overly enthusiastic screams of, “WE JUST DID A MILE!” each time hit a mile marker, but I’m pretty sure it’s something he won’t forget either.

What I don’t love about Walk At Home Homeschool PE

• The only thing I’d change about the app if I could is to have full access to all workouts through the website. With your app subscription if you go to the website you can access the DVDs that your workouts came from. I’d love to have access to all the workouts that Walk At Home pulls from because I absolutely LOVE some that only pop up occasionally.
• I also wish that I could access some of those awesome workouts through iTunes, and while you can access SOME workouts there they are only PARTS of the DVDs vs. the whole. You can, however, purchase the workouts as digital downloads through the main Walk At Home website which is pretty cool. My boy and I have two sets flagged to purchase and thankfully none of them are the fancy dance move videos!

Bottom line on Walk At Home Homeschool PE

We really love this app! It’s such a simplistic way to get your daily workout in. For a teen is an easy way to get that PE credit and it’s way cheaper than a gym membership too!

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To read more about Kendra & her family’s homeschooling journey check out their blog at: Aussie Pumpkin Patch.

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