Welcome to autumn! Anytime the seasons change, it’s important to consciously adjust your exercise routine to stay on track. Schedules change, goals change, and an assortment of activities flood our lifestyles with deadlines and things to do. This year, plan ahead and embrace the season change as a built-in opportunity to rethink how you successfully transition from summer into fall. Here are some tips to help make your adjustment:
- Adapt your outdoor workout to indoor: If you’re running or walking outside, take it indoors and create a new blend of walking/running with a strength circuit that includes pushups, sit ups, squats, and lunges. It’s cold outside, bring the workout indoors.
- Make outdoor chores part of your workout: Chopping wood or raking leaves are very physical activities that are a natural part of the fall. Even building a snowman can be tough work.
- Embrace the outdoors: Mix up the fun outside with skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating, sledding, building a snowman, or taking a winter hike.
- Sign up for a group fitness class: Let someone else plan your workouts for you. All you need to do is show up and follow along. Consider taking a fun dance class like salsa or jitterbug to learn something new while you move.
- Commit to working with a personal trainer: The cold months of winter are a perfect time to review a current workout for safety and proper form, push your workouts to a new level, set new fitness goals, assess the overall balance of the workouts, and/or try something new with the expertise of a personal trainer.
- Try a 30-day challenge: For a simple and easy push without the need to commit to a gym, 30-day challenges can be done at home and rarely take much more than a few minutes of your time, so they’re easy to sprinkle into your busy winter schedule
