Minimizing Fitness Losses During the Holidays

The holiday season is a time that many people have a hard time getting in their workouts. This problem can be compounded by changes in their daily eating habits, due to many holiday culinary temptations.

The good news is that there are things that you can do to minimize the loss of your hard-earned physical conditioning.

What Happens to Your Body When You Exercise?

A consistent exercise routine is a component of your health. It’s important to keep your hiatus as short as possible, which will minimize your losses. You don’t want your exercise habit to be replaced by the habit of not exercising.

One of the key health benefits of exercise is that exercise helps normalize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels. This is perhaps the most important factor that exercise provides to help prevent chronic disease.

A little exercise each day appears to be more beneficial than a lot of activity once or twice a week. It is also important to try to keep yourself in motion as much as possible during each day, as sitting too much is an independent risk factor for chronic disease and reduced life expectancy, even if you’re very fit and exercise regularly.

In addition to its positive metabolic effects, exercise has many other benefits for your mind and body. The increased blood benefits your brain and cardiovascular system, boosting oxygenation, cognitive function and neurotransmitter production, which helps lift your mood.

Exercise also has proven benefits for sleep and sexual function and has been shown to “turn off” your fat genes. Exercise is indeed good medicine, but consistency is required.

Getting Out of Shape Happens Faster Than You Might Think:

The body starts to decondition rapidly when you stop exercising. A conditioned athlete can lose about half of their aerobic conditioning in three months.

A study followed beginners who had exercised for two months and whose strength had increased by 46%. These beginners then stopped training for two months, which resulted in a strength loss of 23%.

Another study involved sedentary individuals as they started a bicycle fitness program for two months, during which time they experienced dramatic cardiovascular improvements. Then these new exercisers quit exercising for two months. At the end of this period, they’d lost ALL of their aerobic gains and returned to their original fitness levels.

If you’re extremely fit and have been fit for a long of time, you may have accumulated some extra protection, but that extra protection won’t last forever.

Cutting Back on Exercise Is Less Detrimental Than No Exercise:
The bottom line is that relatively small amounts of physical activity appear to be effective in maintaining at least some of your fitness progress during a hiatus. So during the holidays, do what you can do to stay active and if you don’t have enough time for a full workout, do mini-workouts and crank up the intensity, which will be much better than doing no workouts at all.

After the holidays, when you get back to your normal workout schedule, be careful to avoid the temptation to work out every day with no recovery breaks. Your body needs time off to recover. Not enough recovery can be just as bad for you as not exercising at all.

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