Staying Fit Through The Holidays

The holiday season can easily disrupt the flow of your eating and workout routines. Even if you have a personal trainer, it’s easy to totally fall off the wagon with your fitness and nutrition if you’re traveling away from Nashville. So here are a few tips for staying fit through the holidays:

Staying Fit Means Not STOPPING Everything

Make your fitness a DIAL instead of a STOP/PLAY button.

Staying Fit Means Not STOPPING Everything

The holiday season disrupts the flow of your days and your eating/workout routine.

If you allow yourself to STOP instead of DIAL, you quickly go from “enthusiastic and committed” to “totally off the wagon.”

It’s an annual cycle that often includes the internal conversation starting with “I’ll get back to it when_______”

This “all or nothing” mentality gets you the “nothing” part.

So here is the solution: Have a DIAL instead of a Stop button.

Here is an example:

If you normally exercise 5 days per week, turn the dial back to 1-2 times per week during your holiday travels.

For your nutrition, if you meal prep and eat healthy daily, turn the dial back to just meal prepping for some meals, and loosen up on some others.

Do what you can during the season, dial it down when you need to. Just don’t STOP everything!

Get Creative With Your Exercise

Just because you’re away from the gym doesn’t mean you can’t flex a few muscles!

  • A gallon of water weighs just over 8 pounds, so you have an adjustable dumbbell that can also keep you hydrated.
  • A small suitcase with a handle makes a decent awkward kettlebell for single-arm rows or swings.
  • There are plenty of workouts you can do at home with no equipment. Bodyweight exercises like squats, lunges, pushups, planks, bear crawls, bridges, ab crunches, and burpees an all be done anywhere with zero exercise equipment needed. Personal trainer Nathan Buckler demonstrates three of these below:

Performing basic bodyweight exercises like planks and squats can be made more difficult by changing the stability of your base. Plank on the bed, or squat on the couch cushions for an added stability challenge!

Even just taking a walk after a meal can go a long way towards keeping you from getting stiff and avoiding too much weight gain. And walking is a great (and free!) stress reliever too.

Ask your personal trainer for a few ideas based on your abilities and current workout.

Staying Motivated To Stay Fit

We are momentum-based creatures — when you’re in a good routine with your physical fitness, it’s easier to keep going. Just remember how hard it is to “start all over” if you take 6 or 8 weeks totally off during the holidays!

Do a little exercise here and there (see DIAL comments above), keep your nutrition flexible not foolish, and don’t forget to stretch since you’ll be sitting around more than usual.

find a personal trainerStaying fit through the holidays is not that difficult if you implement these tips. And if you’d like a customized plan to stay fit through the holidays (and beyond!), just drop us a note and we can talk about a personal training and nutrition plan that’s exactly right for YOU.