Keeping up your exercise routine over Christmas

If you’ve been reading The Office Diet for a while, you’ve probably noticed that my advice on exercise is often “fit it into your regular routine”. I advocate things like:

• Cycling or walking to work
• Going out for a walk with colleagues in your lunch hour
• Fitting in a gym session at lunch or on your way home

…and so on. The problem here is that when it gets to Christmas and a few days away from the office, your exercise routine is likely to go out of the window.

I know that I’ll need to make an effort to keep up with exercising over Christmas. My regular exercise currently involves:

• Walking to and from college (a total of an hour, and much of it up and down hills!) three days a week
• Cycling to my childminding job twice a week (about forty five minutes there and back), and walking the kids home from school (about ten minutes)
• Going to the gym three times most weeks (this sometimes gets shunted aside for extra childminding and running errands, but at least both are active!)

If you work full time in an office, you may get most of your exercise at around 8am and 5pm. This could present problems when Christmas comes and you end up enjoying long lie-ins and lazy afternoons in from of the television, or when you spend most of the day in the car, travelling for hours to visit some relatives who you’re just glad you can avoid for 364 days of the year…

So how can you keep up with semi-regular exercise when your days are following an unpredictable pattern?

Here are a few things I plan to do:

• Manage at least half an hour’s activity every day, even if it’s just a stroll round the block or a big blitz on the housework.
• Go for a walk every day when staying with relatives.
• Try to fit in at least two gym sessions per week whilst at home.

As well as those “routine” exercises, I’d like to use the Christmas period as an excuse to try out some fun activities too. I’ve not been ice-skating for years, and though I know I’m terrible at it, I also know I’ll have a lot of fun!

Good luck sticking to some semblance of an exercise routine over the Christmas period; remember that doing something is better than doing nothing, and that a brisk half-hour’s walk every day can make all the difference to your health and happiness by the time 2008 rolls into 2009…

(Image above by fiskfisk)