Staying Focused Through The Holidays

If you’ve been on a fitness journey, rehab journey, or any type of health journey and feel like the holidays are getting in your way, you’re not alone—trust me. The holiday season is filled with socializing, eating, traveling, staying up late, taking days off work, and maybe enjoying one too many beverages. With all that, it’s easy to feel like it’s impossible to stick to your usual routine, leading to excessive stress and worry about losing your gains.

However, there’s no need to stress—I promise you won’t lose your gains! Current research shows that if you were to completely stop exercising, you would start to lose muscle mass, strength, and aerobic fitness over the course of 1-2 weeks. While this isn’t ideal, and you don’t want to start the new year feeling sluggish or like you’ve taken a step backward, the good news is that there’s a way to maintain your progress during the holidays.

Here’s the plan: use the minimal dose of exercise possible throughout the week to maintain your physical performance. When fitting workouts into your busy holiday schedule, there are a few variables to consider: frequency, volume, intensity, and load. Research shows that endurance training (running, cycling, swimming, etc.) can be reduced by 33-66%, or to just 12-26 minutes per session, to maintain your current fitness levels. However, the intensity of this exercise needs to be at least the same as—or greater than—what you’re used to.

For example, let’s say I typically run for 45 minutes per day with an average heart rate of 150. To maintain my fitness level, I would need to run for 15-30 minutes, 2x per week, while keeping my heart rate above 150 BPM.

A similar concept applies to maintaining strength and muscle size. When the load (weight used per exercise) stays similar to or exceeds previous levels, strength training can be performed just once per week, with one set per exercise per muscle group. It's common to strength train 2-3 times per week and perform 3-4 sets of 6-10 reps per exercise. If time is limited during the holidays, feel free to cut back!

Even though we’re focusing on exercise, I want to remind you that rest is just as important as exercise when it comes to maintaining fitness. The holidays are often filled with extra stress, travel, and late nights. So, it’s okay to take a day off here and there to recover—especially if you’re feeling fatigued or overwhelmed. By allowing yourself proper rest, you’re ensuring that you can hit the ground running, so don’t feel guilty about taking time for recovery.

Lastly, I know it’s hard to resist holiday foods, sweets, candies, and alcoholic beverages. However, I recommend making sure you get adequate protein, greens, fruits, and electrolytes throughout the day to stay healthy and hydrated. To keep it simple: if you can exercise with similar intensity to your usual levels 1-2 times per week over the next few weeks, don’t stress— you’ll be right where you left off come January 1st!