Festive Season Survival Guide 101

 

The festive season, so often the time when people fall off the exercise and health bandwagon and succumb to the endless festivities and overindulgence.

Its happened to us all and yet every year that we go into this period with good intentions we somehow fall into the same traps. It is funny because we get time off for the public holidays, so you would think you we would have more time to train right?

Theoretically yes, in reality, no.

The Xmas/NY holiday period doesn’t work like that, we get busier than ever there are parties everywhere, our family & friends take precedence and we often end up in food coma’s.

We have come up with 4 tips to make the difficult holiday period a little easier.

Training 

We usually have good intentions here, but for most the holiday period is an extended period of inactivity that leads to the dreaded NY’s resolution – sound familiar?

Heres some ideas to try and avoid this all too common occurrence.

Do some small amount of training in the morning before the day gets away from you. I can almost guarantee that if you leave it to later in the day it’s not going to happen. Do it early, get it done you might even eat better later in the day – Win, Win!

The training itself doesn’t need to be long or exhausting you might just do 20 minutes of work on your handstands or some core exercises. A little goes a long way. If you really can’t train or just don’t have the energy for it, do a little bit of light stretching instead it might give you that boost you need. It’s easy to get lethargic, stiff and tight when we are sitting around eating and drinking.

Once the main holiday break is over then get back into training as soon as you can, if you leave it for too long before you know it a whole month has gone by and all of a sudden you will feel like you are back at ground zero.

Eating or overeating

It’s so easy to do at this time of the year so here’s a couple of things to try and help us be mindful of what we are consuming.

Limit the snacks in-between big meals, think of the snacks that you are looking forward to the most and eat those only, don’t start picking up everything that’s available just because it’s there.

Only have one plate, don’t go up for 2nd or 3rd helpings – pile as much as you need too on your plate and once you have finished that then you are done. Fill your plate with as many vegetables and/or salad as you can remember a colorful plate lends itself to being a more balanced one. I hope I don’t need to stress here that a plate of M&Ms whilst colorful is not exactly a well-balanced meal.

Pick a day where you won’t limit yourself and then try to eat as normally as possible on the surrounding days.

Drinking

This usually goes hand in hand with overeating, we drink, we snack then drink some more and so forth. So here we need to be mindful of a couple of things.

We don’t just get calories from food, a lot of the calories we consume in today’s society comes from what we drink and that gets doubled when we consume snacks along with calorie-laden drinks. Make sure that you drink water as well to keep the body hydrated and functioning well. It might also help you limit the amount of alcohol or sugary drinks & snacks that you have

Don’t stress out

We should enjoy the break, so if you do overindulge a bit during this time don’t freak out and think that you are going to have destroyed everything you have worked so hard for.

Use some of the above tips and you should come out the other side feeling better than you probably would have.

Remember we need holidays for a reason, your body needs a break from high-intensity training every now and then & so does the mind. So enjoy the time with your family and friends but be mindful that as long as you can do a little bit of maintenance then it won’t be as hard to get back into training when the holidays are over.

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Merry Xmas peeps and I hope to see you back in the gym smashing goals and having fun.

Jase