Sticking to Your Workout Schedule During the Holidays

By Donna Stark

The holidays can be challenging for many reasons and most of those reasons can have a significant effect on your overall health and wellness. There are the late nights and the lack of sleep, the excess food and the added pounds, but worst of all, there's the complete disruption to your normal fitness schedule and the fallout that comes from it. Wondering what that fallout would be? Well, let's see ... the level of fitness you have worked so hard for could be lost, the stress and tension that you try to reduce through exercise will build, and those happy moods everyone loves may become a sign of the past. Now, I know you don't want to turn into an unfit, stressed-out, moody Grinch over the holidays, so make sure you stay on track with your workouts.

Maintaining Your Fitness Routine

It's a well-established fact that the holiday season is hectic, but with some careful planning, you can still maintain your normal fitness routine. Here are some tips on how to do so.

• Plan ahead and adapt - Check your schedule the week before it hits and plan your workouts in advance. If you need to shorten your time at the gym on any certain day, go ahead and do it. Working out for a little bit is still better than skipping it altogether.
• Maintain what you have - You are already being pulled in a million different directions during the holiday season, so don't make it any harder on yourself. Rather than trying to make any huge fitness gains that may require more time at the gym, just focus on maintaining the level you are at.
• Be flexible - If your child's holiday pageant runs over time and bleeds into your time at the gym, don't have a complete meltdown. Just switch up your routine and do a shorter, more intense workout, or add some extra elements into what you do the next day.
• Sign up for a race - There is nothing that will motivate you to stay on track with your fitness routine more than signing up for a race. Seeing that date circled on your calendar will encourage you to fit your workouts in no matter how difficult it may seem.

Avoiding the Fallout

Work, family, travel, and special events can take up so much of our time during the last few months of the year, so it's important to establish clear strategies on how you plan to maintain your fitness during this time. And when it's all said and done, when the clock strikes 12 on the last day of the year, you can go ahead and pat yourself on the back for a job well done!

To learn more about your health, wellness, and fitness, see your local chiropractor at The Joint Chiropractic in Knightdale, N.C.