How to Keep Working Out Through the Holidays

Holiday Season

There's a reoccurring problem I see every year. Halloween, Thanksgiving December are all approaching rapidly. Most workout plans ignore them and nobody really plans around them. Most people try to figure it out when the holidays get here. Here are 6 things a plan needs to get you from now to January.

Use October properly

October is the last normal month of the quarter. For the most part your schedule doesn't change much. So this is the month to lock in 3 days a week and actually push. Add a little weight or 1 more rep to your main lifts each week and write it down so you can see the improvement. The Incline Push-Up on a box is a good one to watch here, because you can make it harder without adding any weight at all. Start with your hands on a box or bench high enough that you can get all your reps with your body in a straight line from your head to your heels. Once that's true for 2 sessions in a row, drop to something a bit lower and build back up. By the end of the month you'll be pushing from a lower surface than you started on, and that's something you can actually see. That's the part the holiday weeks are there to protect. If you'd rather not write October out yourself, there are plans that are already written out for you.

A shorter version of your week, written now

Once the holidays approach you don't have the same amount of hours free, and trying to force it in is usually how people end up doing nothing at all. Write a short version instead, 2 sessions of about 30 to 40 minutes. Keep the first 2 or 3 main lifts from your normal days, drop everything after them and do 2 sets of each. It feels like too little then add on top of it. The important part is planning it out now while you've got the headspace, instead of trying to put it together the week of Thanksgiving when everything else is going on too. If you want help laying it out, the Weekly Routine Builder will build the short week around the days you actually have. It's free, under Fitness Tools.

Place your workouts in your schedule

All of your dinners, travel and parties end up on a calendar weeks ahead of time. Your sessions usually don't, so they're the first thing to get moved when something else comes up. Put them on the same calendar now. Not just the normal weeks but the short ones too. The key is to treat them like everything else that's booked. You can still move one, you just have to actually move it rather than out right deleting it.

The week you miss

You're probably going to miss a week somewhere in here, and that's fine as long as you've already decided what happens next. The next week is the short version, 2 sessions, and that's it. You don't go back to week 1 and you don't try to make up the missed sessions by doubling up. Your strength doesn't go anywhere in a week, and what actually causes people to fall off is treating one missed week as the reason to call it until January.

Food, food and food

Decide now which events actually matter to you. The family dinner, the party you look forward to all year, work events or whatever else. Enjoy those properly and don't spend them feeling guilty. The days in between are just normal days, so eat the way you normally eat on them. A lot of people get this backwards, they're careful at the events and loose on all the days around them, because the whole season starts to feel like one long event and every day turns into a reason.

The date you're back to normal

Pick it now. The first Monday in January is what everyone picks. If that's the one you pick fine, put it in the calendar with everything else and stick to it.

The holidays themselves aren't the problem. The problem is not planning ahead and expecting everything to just fall into place