Over the course of the 3 month quarantine, my brother and I have been really cramped from not exercising as much as we used to. So, we decided that we should take runs everyday to exercise our body. However after two weeks of running everyday, we soon got bored of running and we challenged ourselves to find other ways to do cardio exercises but also have fun. So, with our crafting skills we put together a multitude of sports in our backyard.
The very first sport that we started with was badminton. We had a badminton set in our garage and our sports journey starts there. We currently have 3 rackets and 3 tubes of shuttlecocks (basically badminton balls). Since we have been playing badminton everyday since quarantine started, we've learned to play as a left-handed player and a right-handed player.
Then next sport that we included into our daily exercise was baseball. Both my brother and I have played baseball when we were very young, so both the bat and the mitts are extremely small. However, we didn't want to buy baseball equipment during quarantine, so we made do with what we had. It was still an absolute blast.
Our third sport was one that we technically already had, but we never played. This was basketball. The backboard of our basketball hoop had broken off and the ball always bounced in random places when hitting the pole on the back. So, one day, we took a piece of wood, created a backboard and attached it onto the hoop. Although it might sound easy, we had to do a lot of measuring and tinkering. Since both my brother and I are on a robotics team, we both knew how to use power tools and machining tools so that also sped up the process a lot.
Our fourth sport was a pretty easy one. We challenged ourselves to juggle so we just took some of our tennis balls and started practicing juggling.
Our fifth sport was golf. Our neighbors had gifted us an entire golf set when they decided on an upgraded golf set. We had never played golf before but we were eager to try. So we dug a hole on our backyard and got to practicing. Soon enough, we were getting hole-in-one's!
Around the time of starting to golf, we had discovered an old grill in our shed and we decided that as a "Summer of New" activity, we would. try to start up the grill. Then, we thought of another idea, what if we put a canopy in our backyard, take our swinging chair, and have a BBQ in our backyard. So that's what we did.
After looking long and hard around our house for so long, we had discovered old baseball gear, golf gear, and badminton gear. Then, we discovered some table tennis gear. So we took a spare table that we had and started playing table tennis. Although it was a lot smaller than a normal table tennis table, we still had loads of fun and exercised a lot.
So, after spending 3 months in quarantine, we have accumulated 8 activities to do in our backyard. We have played badminton, baseball, table tennis, golf, basketball, juggling, and had a barbecue. I hope that this post gives you more inspiration to find your passion and find something fun during such gloomy times. Stay well.