I arrived at Pomar na Praia with what I thought was a clear plan: work hard, workout a bit, fix my lack of building social connections. The “workout a bit” line was the one I had given least thought to, and the one that ended up reshaping the stay more than anything else.
Week one: nothing. Adjusting to the place, the food, the rhythm, the weather. Standard issue.
Week two: I noticed the kit. Kettlebell, a few mats, resistance bands, set up outside in the garden. Nothing fancy, all of it free, all of it ignored by most of the new arrivals. I started using it on quiet mornings. The first session lasted twenty minutes. The garden floor was hard enough that I felt every kettlebell swing in my heels for two days.
Week three: the first community workout. Organised by the community manager, optional, slightly awkward to commit to in the way that all “first ones” are. Six of us showed up. We did, broadly, the same exercises I had been doing in the garden, but as a group — which somehow made the same movements harder and easier at the same time. I went home tired and oddly pleased with myself.
Week four: CrossFit. I had never done CrossFit. I had opinions about CrossFit. Most of those opinions did not survive contact with the first session, which I survived in the technical sense — I finished it, I did not throw up, my knees still worked when I stood up afterwards. That counted as a win.
Week five was a different kind of training. A community member ran a hypnotherapy session. I went in mostly out of social curiosity and came out of it convinced enough that I went again the following week. File this under “things you do at a coliving that you would not do at home.”
Week six is the week the routine stopped feeling like a routine. I started cold plunges in the pool after workouts — the kind of thing that sounds excellent in a write-up and feels appalling for the first three breaths. I also picked up the mobility programme from Hit the Beat, which had nothing to do with Pomar but everything to do with the fact that, by then, I was paying attention to my body in a different way.
Week seven: the workout was organised by the community manager and me. The first time I had been a co-organiser of anything fitness-related in my adult life. We held the first community beach workout that weekend, which involved a lot of sand getting into places sand should not get into, and the most honest hour of laughter I had in the entire stay.
By week nine I was out of the building for a week — the hotel interlude — and the fitness experiment ran a controlled test for me. Alone, in a Fuseta hotel, with no equipment and no community, what I wrote down was simple: “light bodyweight workouts,” and underneath: “No motivation for proper workouts, guess i need people around me for that.”
That single line is the thesis of the entire stay. The kettlebell in the garden did not change me. The community around the kettlebell did.
Weeks ten through thirteen settled back into the rhythm: morning run, weights workout, breakfast on the terrace, community workouts twice a week, Nanobrew on the evenings I had earned it. I left Pomar with a fitness baseline I had not had on arrival and absolutely no intention of trying to maintain it in Berlin alone. The arc only worked here.
The verdict for any prospective workationer vaguely curious about the gym side of things: the kit at Pomar is real and adequate. The community around the kit is the actual feature.