Holiday Survival Guide – Week 2 – Exercise

You probably knew that you wouldn’t get through a 12-week series with me and not have me mention exercise, right? The reason that I’m putting it into the 2nd week and not towards the middle is because last week we talked about planning and I think that exercise should be planned into this season just as are all the parties, pageants and gatherings.

At a minimum if we can keep our exercise in place, then we are helping to burn a few extra calories or gain a few activity points. This will certainly help because I just know that extra unplanned goodies will be had.

Exercise doesn’t have to be done in one block, and during the holiday season big blocks of time usually aren’t readily available. So if we acknowledge that, we can then insert little pockets of extra movement throughout the day. This gets our exercise in and can actually benefit our metabolism by giving it several positive bumps during the day.

Here are a few things that you can do in 10-minute blocks throughout the day. Select three or more of these, and you have your activity in for the day. Everyone has 10 minutes, between commercial breaks at TV time, standing over a stove cooking dinner, breaks and lunches at work or waiting for a son or daughter to finish an after school practice.

• Walk a half-mile or better yet push yourself and walk 1 mile.
• Jog in place or do high knee raises.
• Dance around the house to your favorite music. Get your kids involved and they will benefit too.
• Jump Rope or fake jump rope if you don’t have one.
• 5 minutes of squats, followed by 5 minutes of bicep curls (use some soup cans from the store).
• Walk up and down stairs.

If you don’t want to do one of these for ten minutes combo up a few of them and make each of them be 2-3 minutes and you will be feeling better and energized in a relatively short period of time.

Our holidays are busy, but by incorporating a small amount movement we can stay on track and give a gift to ourselves.