How to manage the stress of the season
With five weeks to go until Christmas, many (if not most) people are focusing on managing “overwhelm,” the feeling there just isn’t enough time to do all of the things that need to be done.
The list includes shopping, cooking, planning, inviting, wrapping, entertaining and travelling. Added to this list are the responsibilities involved in closing the business year if you are self-employed or all of the functions that need attending if you are otherwise employed, from parties to year-end meetings. It’s little wonder that fitness and nutrition get pushed to the bottom of the list of priorities for many people. (Hint … these are the people who contact me, in desperation, in January).
Conversely, I know lots of people who manage just fine through the last eight weeks of the year. The difference is that they have learned to maintain a mindset where they don’t expect perfection, but they also won’t accept failure. Their sweet spot is somewhere in the middle where they “just keep going” — doing enough to keep moving forward, but not so much that they reach “overwhelm.” For the most part, they also plan their exercise and nutrition in a strategic way.
If you are an exerciser feeling the stress of the season, here are five simple things you can do immediately to help you maintain focus and just keep going:
1. Strength first. If you are exercising to maintain lean muscle and burn body fat, always complete your strength training before you do cardiovascular exercise. When you do this (along with eating a moderate carbohydrate diet), you will burn stored sugar during your strength training and then burn fat at an enhanced rate during the cardio portion of your exercise.
2. Dynamic stretching vs. static stretching. One of the ways to “keep going” is to approach your workouts with a strategy. Take five minutes before every session doing dynamic stretching — controlled movements that take your body through ranges of motion to prepare you for the activity to come. After your training, spend a few minutes doing the opposite; complete a slow, full-body stretching routine as a physical and mental cool down.
3. Undulating exercise. If you are exercising more than once per week (as you should), plan for a different style of workout each time. For instance, complete a moderate/heavy weight workout on Monday, an endurance/circuit workout on Wednesday and a Friday workout based on “functional” full body movements emphasizing balance and co-ordination.
4. Plan activity for the long, dark evenings. After we begin losing daylight in the fall, it is normal for people to feel less motivated and energetic as the pull to hibernate becomes stronger. One way to offset this is to extend the amount of “energy time” that you experience each day. Instead of lying on the couch, watching TV from 6 p.m. until bedtime, do mall walking, join an exercise class or go to the gym where there is light, music and people — much like you might do during the summer.
5. Emphasize intensity when short on time, emphasize duration when less busy. As your life changes, so should your workout! In my experience, lack of time is not a valid excuse for missing a session. I have had some phenomenal workouts in less than 15 minutes. The trick is to double up the intensity, taking little to no rest between sets and focusing on multi-joint movements versus using exercises that isolate only one muscle at a time. On days where you find yourself with as much time as you’d like to take, spend extra time warming up, cooling down and isolating specific muscles as you would in bodybuilding.
A final note: Take a few minutes at the beginning the week where you put into writing what your exercise week will look like. Plan to fit your program into your life and don’t even consider not doing it! You actually have more control over your life than you might think.