Transcript has been edited for ease of reading.

Hey everybody, it is Michelle from the strong and simple podcast. I hope that you are feeling well today as we head into the most wonderful magical time of the year.

That being said this holiday season that tends to fall between this end of november and the new year there's a holiday season while it is filled with lots of joy and memory making and merry making it also can come with a ton of stress anxiety write all these things that spending more time with family spending more time with friends having a much busier social calendar then perhaps you're used to especially coming off of two years of being the pandemic with lots of spikes with covid nineteen right people really laying low in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one but now we're trying to play catch up right and we have a lot of things that we want to do and a lot of people that we want to see and while these are all fun and exciting um can also leave us feeling really exhausted and even stressed about the amount of things we have to do.

If you are already kind of feeling a way about this in about this season it feels maybe worse then it felt before or in years past know that you're not alone because it's really hard to kind of be getting back into the swing of things and back out into the world and after two years of not being super normal right so just know that you're not alone with this so what i want to talk to you about today is five ways to stay consistent with your fitness routine with your training routine with your workout routine however you want to call it and if you are somebody who is working out for general well being um you love strength training or you do it because you know it's good for you this this advice is going to be different and directed more towards that general overall well being folks more so than if you are an athlete who is actively especially if you're actively training for let's say a marathon or a power lifting competition right?

This my advice for you well would have similar friends um and patterns would be a little bit different so take that with a little a grain of salt while we're talking about these five tips I have for every day people who are working out strength training and or cardio for general well being this time of year because we tend to be much more busy we have more things happening social wise we have event that we want to go and do we have holiday shopping that may be we need to go out do decorating the tree things like that all of these things are not part of our normal every day to do list right and these now get added on to our every day to do list and if you are a care giver if you're a parent or a care giver if you are a care giver for your parents this means also events at um you know your child school or medical appointments for your parents like those things just seem to really add up in this month that we're heading into.

So if you are feeling anxious because you're like oh i've been so consistent with my workout and now i'm going to so busy and i want you to first just take a deep breath and i know i say that a lot on this on this podcast because it's true you know first of all if you are already very consistent with your routine a few weeks of being not so consistent is not going to ruin all your gains right it's just not it's actually especially if you've been trained fairly hard and you've been training pretty consistently a few weeks even off completely is not going to destroy all of the hard work that you've already been putting in um into your gains and when you get back into it you might have to you know take your weight down a little bit take your reps down a little bit take that intensity down a little bit but it's going to come back. Our bodies are really cool like

That! So if you need a little vacation from working out from training during the holiday season first of all you do you and you do what you need to do especially if trying to find time for your workout is causing more stress it's just not worth it for a couple of weeks right so show yourself some compassion and kindness

But that kind of leads us into my first piece of advice for you and that is to be realistic with your training when we are setting goals for ourselves. So some of you might know i am also a special education teacher um and i write a lot of goals for and with a lot of students and the biggest thing in goal writing is you want your goals to be challenging but you want them to be achievable we have this comfort zone we have stretch zone and then we have the like holy shit this is too hard zone and when we're goal setting we really want to try to find ourselves in that stretch zone so during the holiday season with our fitness thinking about just maybe being just over the comfort zone just into stretch zone really trying to stay away from that holy shit this is too hard zone because that's just going to lead to frustration and that holy shit this is too hard zone might mean time right or how many training sessions you do or how long your training sessions are so being really realistic with what your training currently looks like this is probably for many people not the best time to go from no days of training to six days a week of training

I mean, there are some people out there like obviously not all advice applies to all people all the time, but this season if you're already feeling like your calendar is filling up really fast in your feeling a little bit more fatigued than usual this is not the time to necessarily even if you've been consistently training for three days a week to be like now i'm going to start training for five days a week maybe that's a shift you make after the holidays when time kind of opens up again so really being realistic with what your goals are for these four or five weeks and how achievable are they and how challenging are they right in trying to find that balance.

And this might mean that your goal during the holiday season is to stay like at a maintenance level to just keep consistent this might look like coming home from work each day putting on your whatever you wear to work out and doing ten minutes of a work out right you're still keeping in the habit you're staying consistent of that mind set of training but it doesn't necessarily mean that you are, you know, upping the ante or the resistance or the time or any of those other variables during your training. So being realistic with your goal setting and what are you hoping to achieve is are you going for a new p r with your deadlift you like almost there and you want to make sure or you're really like you want to do this before 2023 if that's a really important goal to you and you've been already consistently working towards that i think that you can still manage that right but be realistic with yourself of what the rest of your time and life is looking like and how much time you're then going to have in gym to be working towards that goal okay.

So just be realistic with yourself so that you are setting yourself up for success and positive experiences while you're working towards that goal um and not feeling kind of shitty right when you're or like feeling guilty or any sort of shame that can come around like “well i said i was going to do this four days a week but I only made it out to the gym (i'm doing air quotes here) two times this week” Right?

We want to set ourselves up to be successful with our habits and our goals so keeping that kind of the forefront and the top of this everything els kind of falls into like how we can support that goal being realistic and one of the things you want to do is plan yeah take out your calendar.

I find paper and pencil calendars to be really useful and you can actually print these off of the internet for free or just like draw boxes on a piece of paper depending on how you know artistic you are whatever or if you have a planner, right, looking at that calendar having the different social events that are going on having any like longer work days. This is also a time of year when a lot of businesses are at the end of the year right. So if you, especially if you work in retail you're probably working longer hours. If you work in finances or taxes or things like that you're starting to you're up for the end of the year stuff that happens right if you own a business you're like starting to be like all right then i want to make sure my spreadsheets, my p & l sheets, are up to date are ready to go for january first so i'm ready to roll into 2023, right?

So by like there's all the other stuff in addition to the holidays that happens this month that adds to having less time for other things so looking at your calendar again keeping that mindset of being realistic, then look for the areas of opportunity when you can do your training sessions your workouts your movement sessions whatever we're calling them right and looking at all right. “This week i have monday wednesday fridays after school this is me personally after school i don't have i'm not and i don't have any one: on one clients until the evening on those days my opportunity for training is between : four and five thirty on monday wednesday friday this month so i'm going to put it on my calendar and that's my date to myself. Those are my three days that i'm going to aim to do my strength sessions. I'm also prioritizing strength over daily walk because i do through my job and just like my life i tend to hit at least five thousand steps a day without having to think too much about it so it's not really hard for me get in that five thousand to seventy five hundred steps a day range so for me adding a half hour walk in it's something that it's nice you know i love walking it's super beneficial but that kind of gets put on the back burner one i have time constraints so my strength sessions become the priority and then i look at okay so now i have saturdays and sundays when i can do yoga session in the morning and or a high intensity interval training bike ride.

These are great these are supplemental for me right now to my priority part of my training which are my three full body strength sessions a week right so that's kind of how i would look i'm keeping realistic. i'm super busy right now but i have these pockets of opportunity three afternoons a week to get those strength sessions in and then i have some other areas where if i'm feeling energized or feeling up to it and if i'm not like for the yoga i can do a restorative yoga session and that might be what i need that day right so i plug those in knowing that they're there they're supplemental for me they're complimenting my strength training.

If you are a runner, perhaps your running schedule is what is your priority sessions during your week and then and now you really should keep up with that strength training but perhaps you have three days of running and you have two lower body strength sessions to make sure we're keeping glutes strong making sure we're keeping our quads strong, our core strong that sort of stuff so you're being realistic with your time and you are using that realism to help you plan and plot out your weeks. And this might be overwhelming to do from a month overview so start and just do it the week ahead of time right now that being said so we're keeping it keeping it real we are planning right trying to set out our plan and then this might also mean that we are then going to either simplify and or shorten our session.

So for me my example i'm using myself i have three days a week when i can get three longer strength sessions in however there is other times when i might only have thirty minutes do some movement so that week i might actually have instead of three sixty minute sessions i might do five thirty minute sessions and being okay with that m prioritizing my big lifts the dead lift the squat the bench press and then doing those on maybe doing deadlifts on one day squats on another the heavy ones and then doing some of the supplemental work that is also very important to being stronger in these bigger lifts right- the lateral lunges the step ups things like that those then go on other days.

So now i have a few shorter work outs, spread throughout the week, as opposed to longer sessions which can feel really really oh shit this is too hard i don't have sixty minutes but you might have thirty you might have twenty you might have fifteen and fitness snacks like five ten minutes throughout the day. So maybe you have ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes at lunch, ten minutes in the afternoon or evenings - those three ten minute chunks of time, those little snacks throughout the day add up to thirty minutes total of movement for your day.

You are benefiting your overall well being, so those count. So this was an example. So those i kind of blended i had to keep it simple and keep it short. They kind of just go hand in hand because sometimes by simplifying things taking out what are like big ideas the main ideas and taking the details out for now while you're shorter on time you're simplifying you're hitting all of the major body parts that you need to hit this is only for a short period of time too.

I'm not talking about only deadlifting for like as to your life that's going to create some muscle imbalances it is if you've been here for a while you know i would just deadlift all day every day and do nothing else, but i do know that i need to do other things in order to keep balanced and so i can keep making progress with my deadlifts.

So we're making our goals for this season realistic. Being real, keeping it real we are planning by looking for areas of opportunity to put movement into our day and recognizing by being real stick what that movement might look different those sessions might look different this month than they typically do because we're keeping them shorter and or simplifying them. Taking the big rocks, the main idea, the meat and potatoes right and then everything else can kind of sift in when we have pockets of other opportunity to get things in - leads me to number five which i think is one of the most important parts of this when we are thinking about keeping consistent and with keeping consistent with our fitness training movement workout whatever during the holidays is to have fun. To have fun we want and i think i've talked before about definitely when we had Barb on the podcast back last february and Barb’s you know big you know signature program is the joyful movement project and when we're talking about joyful movement we are looking for movement that is enhancing our lives that is bringing joy to us and this doesn't mean because then there's a lot of push back from especially from the bros well if you're like a joyful movement you're just like rolling around on the floor.

First of all, rolling on the, rolling around on the floor is really great for our nervous system but

to feeling joyful might mean that you just completed a really hard hill run right. Maybe you're training for a five K and you've added some hill repeats to your training and like you just accomplished split in a time that you haven't done or maybe you just bench pressed a new weight for you and this is really exciting, this is something you've been working for that's joyful just because something is joyful doesn't mean it's not challenging.

So anyway i just want to put that out there but during the holidays when there is a lot of other stress in our lives when we're looking for movement to be a destresser a stress reliever we want something to be bringing us joy so when you are realistically planning and adapting your sessions keeping them shorter and simpler for this time of year remember to keep the parts of your training that bring you joy. If you love sprinting, keep your sprint day in. If you love your long run, make sure you are trying to find that day that opportunity for your long run. If you love walking lunges - more power to you like those will always be the first thing i cut out of my work out but anyways, that's why i also have a coach who programs for me. But if you love walking lunges make sure you incorporate walking lunges into your training program and if you're working with a coach who is programming for you make sure you let them know that and a good coach is going to take all of this into consideration for you, right?

There's also a lot of fun challenges - i keep going back to running. Running is super on my brain, it's not something i've done in like a year, but be maybe this is the universe telling me i should start running again but anyways if you are there's like a lot of really fun like holiday five K that happened this month.

I like to do what i call the #100SwingsADayForTheHolidays - i call it a challenge but it's something that i've done over the past couple of years and it's kind of an anchor and sometimes those hundred swings take me five minutes sometimes they are added on to the end of a workout and sometimes that's the one thing i do for movement during the day and it really helps me anchor myself during the holidays. So if anybody wants to join me in a hundred swings a day for the holidays um you know just join in the fun just use a little hash tag at the beginning of that tag me and your in your your videos on the gram or on facebook if you would like i would love to see how you're doing!

And for swings that could also mean, sometimes i'm doing i'm doing snatches, sometimes i'm practicing cleans, sometimes i'm doing two handed swing sometimes, i'm doing single arm swing - so it could really mean anything and you could make it whatever you want!

It's just a fun way to add that consistency in.

So, overall, when you are aiming to be consistent during the holidays

first tip - be realistic okay your movement should be helping you de-stress not increase stress To have a plan - look for areas of opportunity for you to get your movement in knowing that you might need to

- three simplify and / or

- four shorten your work out to make them work for you your sessions might look differently this time of year than they do another time and that is fine and actually might be really beneficial for you and most importantly

- five have fun. Try a new class somewhere, try um there's lots of charity types of things that happen this time year, try a zumba class do something new and different and fun that brings some joy into your movement practice for you this holiday session or training. Your workouts should not feel like a chore this time of year - they should be enhancing your overall happiness and well being, helping to relieve stress, not add to it.

So hopefully these were helpful for you. I would love to hear from you if they are and i hope to see some of you tag me a hundred swings a day for the holidays! We will have some fun with that and I will talk to you soon.

All right have a great day everybody!