Reduce Exercise Stress During the Holidays

It's mid-November and just a few days before Thanksgiving, and if you're not feeling the time crunch already, you know it is coming and fast - the Holidays.

Exercise is a stress buster and helps maintain mental alertness. During the holidays, it is absolutely essential to fit in those workouts, if only for sanity's sake. The compressed timeline of family, social and year-end obligations works against that sanity break.

While no one has invented a way to add extra hours to the day, or a way to workout without burning time along with calories, here are a few tips to get the most out of your routine:

1. Increase how often you work out, but decrease the amount of time you spend doing it. When you are pressed for time every day, it is easy to skip that hour-long workout with an excuse about a lack of time. Break up those hour-long, three day a week plans with 30-minute options like interval training or high intensity lifting. Take a half-hour walk at lunchtime, do the stairs each day - you can find 30 minutes every single day for fitness.

2. Keep it simple. Use basic moves and equipment to get the most out of your workout. Squats, lunges, pushups, deadlifts, chinups, tricep dips - body weight moves that can be done with or without weights. Pop in a workout DVD and get it done.

3. Leave the gym feeling better than you did before. Less time in the gym at first might seem a call to "compress" a regular routine into a shorter time period. Fewer reps, higher weight or pushing speed on the treadmill seems like an efficient use of time, but when you can't walk up the stairs and you are falling asleep at work because of nighttime leg cramps - it is a bad idea. Save those crazy-hard workouts for the new year (when the newbies are hogging the machines anyway).

4. Try new things. This may seem counter-intuitive to #2, but if you are that one-hour, three day exerciser, switching things up will prevent the pitfalls of #3. Go to that early-morning spinning or yoga class, hit the gym at lunch or schedule a 30 minute personal training session. Do a kickboxing workout you find on YouTube. If you are a seasoned runner, cyclist or other sport enthusiast, cross-train.

5. Get your workout in early. Hear me out.

First, working out early requires planning. You need to go to bed early and prepare your stuff for the next day. So, in the process, you make time instead of finding time. That’s huge at a stressful time when you’re inclined to miss a session altogether.

Second, most people have better energy in the morning than after a long day of work. It does take time to warm up to the idea (and feeling) of working out early. If you’re going to make the switch, give it a few weeks and be consistent with it; you’ll find that you get more and more comfortable with mornings with each time you do it.

Third, I’m a firm believer in the adage that one hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours of sleep after midnight. When you train in the morning, you’ve got to get to bed earlier or else it simply isn’t going to happen.

6. If things are just too crazy one day, skip the gym. That's right. After all this admonishment about going to the gym - things happen - and if that workout just isn't going to happen, let it go. Retrench and come back strong the next day.

You are committed. Make it happen.