Holiday Fitness By: Lisa Ritchie

You hear those sleigh bells jingling and the cookies are calling. The fitness routine you’ve been so faithful to is falling by the wayside as you steam into the holiday season. With a little bit of planning, you can survive the holidays without sacrificing all of your earlier hard work. Here are a few tips:

1. Be realistic. Take an honest look at your schedule and be flexible. Make a plan and then… make another plan. A “Plan B”. maybe even a Plan C.

2. Make an appointment with yourself. Schedule your exercise as you would a meeting or a date and keep that appointment. Write it down, add it to your phone’s calendar.

3. Do home workouts if time is tight. Save those extra minutes wasted driving to the gym. If you have some home equipment, use it. Fitness bands, a jump rope, a TRX trainer are all compact and take up very little space. Or try running up and down the stairs, you can even use some water bottles as free weights (and we mean free!). Even the local library has free workout DVDs. Snow shoveling and raking leaves count too.

4. Involve your friends and family members. Time is tight during the holidays. Instead of entertaining over coffee and cake, invite your guests on a walk through the neighborhood to look at the holiday lights. Keep the pace brisk!

Sledding, ice skating, and an impromptu snowball fight all get the heart rate up. Use your imagination and think outside the box. Power walk through the mall. Take the stairs. Go “Rocky Balboa” and use the local school’s bleachers. Most of all have fun!