Why Most Winter Exercise Strategies Don't Work & How to Overcome Them

How to Win Your Fitness Battle During the Winter Months.

Winter often brings cold weather, shorter days, and a temptation to stay indoors. Many people find their exercise routines faltering during this season, despite numerous strategies designed to maintain consistency. Let's explore why most of these strategies fail and how you can effectively overcome these challenges.

Terrible Strategies and How to Fix Them

1   Setting Overambitious Goals

• The Problem: Winter's more difficult outdoor conditions can make it tough to meet lofty fitness goals. When goals are too ambitious, the likelihood of falling short increases, leading to frustration and demotivation.

• The Solution: Set realistic, achievable goals that accommodate the season’s limitations. Focus on maintaining rather than drastically improving your fitness. A good personal trainer will help you establish realistic goals and then break them down into the smaller, easy to achieve daily tasks required to attain your goals.

2   Ignoring the Need for Adaptation

• The Problem: Sticking to a summer routine without adjusting for winter’s demands can be discouraging. For instance, running in the dark or cold can be unappealing and less effective.

• The Solution: Adapt your routine to fit winter conditions. This might mean exercising at different times of the day, changing your workout type, or moving your exercise indoors – especially on those cold, rainy days.

3   Lack of Accountability and Support

• The Problem: Exercising alone can be particularly challenging in winter when motivation wanes. The absence of a support system can lead to skipped workouts.

• The Solution: Find a workout buddy or good personal trainer. Having someone to share the experience with can provide mutual motivation and accountability. At Club Forma we now have two-on-one sessions available if you would like to try training with a friend.

4   Underestimating the Importance of Mental Preparation

• The Problem: Winter blues and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can sap motivation, making it hard to stick to any exercise plan.

• The Solution: Prioritise mental health by incorporating mood-boosting activities, such as sound frequency therapy, social interaction, and ensuring adequate sleep. A positive mindset will significantly enhance your commitment to exercising. Ask your Club Forma personal trainer which sound frequencies help boost energy levels and where you can easily access them.

The Best Strategies for Winter Success

1. Create a Flexible Plan: Develop a workout schedule that allows for changes. If you can't go for a run, have a backup plan like a strength training workout at a personal training studio or a yoga session.
   

2. Embrace Technology: Use fitness apps and trackers to keep your routine on track, exciting and varied. Tracking your workouts, in a fitness app such as Trainerize, and knowing that your trainer will see whether you have completed it or not also provides accountability, support and motivation.
   

3. Focus on Enjoyment: Find winter activities that compliment your gym routine and you enjoy, such as indoor swimming, dance classes, indoor rowing, or even winter sports like skiing. Enjoyment can be a powerful motivator.
   

4. Manage Expectations: If I’m not feeling like doing my workout, I tell myself I can take it easy and do an 80% intensity session. This gets me on the gym floor working out and fosters consistency. It’s not reasonable to expect to train full-blast every session. Next time you’re having an internal motivation crisis, give it a try!
   

5. Establish a Reward System: Give yourself something to look forward to after a workout. This could be a warm bath, a favourite healthy snack, or watching an episode of a beloved TV show.

By understanding why common strategies fail and implementing strategic solutions, you can maintain your exercise routine throughout the winter. The key is to stay flexible, find enjoyment in your activities, utilise the wealth of knowledge your personal trainer has for keeping things interesting, and adapt your plans to fit the season's unique challenges.

Tips on Exercise for Preventing and Treating Diabetes

Get Active to Control Blood Sugar and Counteract Pre-diabetes

Maintaining an active lifestyle is not just about shedding pounds or sculpting muscles; it plays a pivotal role in preventing and managing Type 2 diabetes. This chronic condition, characterised by insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels, is a growing global concern. Fortunately, the solution might be as simple as scheduling a resistance training workout with your personal trainer, along with lacing up your sneakers and hitting the pavement.

Exercise, the Ultimate Weapon!

Regular exercise acts as a potent weapon against Type 2 diabetes by addressing two key factors: weight management and insulin sensitivity. Engaging in physical activity helps control body weight, reducing the risk of developing diabetes. Moreover, exercise enhances insulin sensitivity, allowing cells to efficiently use glucose for energy.

Aerobic exercises, such as walking, running, and cycling, have been particularly effective in diabetes prevention and management. These activities not only aid in weight loss but also improve the body's ability to utilise insulin. Additionally, building muscle through strength training plays a crucial role in diabetes prevention. Mayo Clinic research underscores that an increase in overall muscle mass can reduce the risk of progressing to diabetes by an impressive 32 percent for individuals with pre-diabetes.

Effectively, when you exercise, you're instructing your body on efficient sugar storage within your muscles instead of the bloodstream. The more you engage in physical activity, the more efficiently your body utilises sugar.

To maximise the benefits, research has shown that completing two to three strength-training sessions weekly, preferably on nonconsecutive days works best. And for optimal results, combining these sessions with aerobic exercises in a single workout yields even more substantial enhancements in blood glucose levels.

NOTE: Ensure to have your water bottle within reach during extended periods of physical exertion, particularly in the warmer summer months. Inadequate hydration can significantly impact blood glucose levels.

Timing is of the Essence

Of course, the best time to do exercise is when you can fit it into your busy lifestyle, however exercises can often be relegated to the bottom of one's to-do list, particularly when managing the challenges of a chronic condition like diabetes. This underscores the significance of incorporating your workout sessions into your schedule with the same commitment as any other essential task.

Studies indicate that the optimal time for physical activity, especially for maintaining blood glucose levels, is one to three hours after meals when blood sugar levels tend to be higher. This is because exercise mimics the action of insulin in the body, directly reducing blood glucose levels, according to findings from a 2017 study in Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome. The research revealed that individuals with type 2 diabetes who engaged in brisk 15-minute walks shortly after meals experienced lower blood glucose levels compared to those who opted for a single 45-minute daily walk before breakfast.

What We Recommend

At Club Forma, our fitness professionals typically prescribe three resistance training sessions, coupled with three to four 20-30min aerobic sessions, such as cycling, running, or elliptical, per week. This, varies depending on the clients goals and fitness levels.

Consistency and building your exercises routine into your lifestyle in a steady and sustainable way is the key to winning, so let's step into a healthier future, one comprehensive workout at a time.

Reference:

Mayo Clinic. (Year). Title of the Mayo Clinic Research Study. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), Page Range. DOI or URL

Why Your Nutrition Probably Isn’t Working and What you Can do to Fix It

Part 01 of 02: Unpacking the Nutrition Mystery

I always get lots of questions from clients, friends and people generally, about nutrition ideas and nutrition philosophies – things they’ve read about on the internet or seen on their Instagram, new fad diets or belief systems they’ve seen on late night television heard about from their friends or even just stuff they’ve come up with themselves while lying in bed awake at night.

Read along if you want to learn why your nutrition probably isn’t working and what you can do to fix it.

There is one trend I’ve noticed over the past 25 years about the questions I am being asked – they’re getting more ridiculous… it seems people are worse informed and more confused now, about the basics of nutrition, than they have ever been. And this is despite there being more solid, well researched scientific facts about what people need to be doing to attain a good healthy well balanced diet.

I think the following words by Dr John Berardi (Precision Nutrition) really illustrate what I’m talking about…

Nowadays, it seems like people are starting to think of nutrition as a "belief system" vs. a legitimate science. In other words, the answer to "What should I eat?" is determined by faith, magical thinking, emotional attachments, or what feels "truthy"... ...rather than on real evidence or the scientific method. And until we fix this, nutrition will only get more confusing, not less. The big problem: Most people start with the Internet. You don't have to look far on Facebook or Instagram to find a charismatic person with a great body and sales pitch offering their own beliefs as a "protocol" or "system". Plus, a quick search on Google for "healthy eating", "healthy diet", or "good nutrition" turns up hundreds of millions of results. Each person or website has its own story: A story about which diet, supplement, food, or nutrition practice someone *believes* is best. Yet nutrition is NOT a belief system. Nutrition is a *science*. Like chemistry and physics, it follows certain principles. And, when you understand these principles, you're able to make the best decisions for yourself (and/or recommendations for others). Base your nutrition choices on FACT, not feelings.

To be clear: We're not "bad" for wanting to follow belief systems. Following a clear set of rules can be a huge relief to those of us that find nutrition confusing or overwhelming. The people who start or share a belief system aren't "bad" either. Most of them are good, genuine, positive people just trying to make other people's lives better. But the problem happens when we base our own health decisions on emotional bias or the rules of a certain philosophy... ...and either ignore what science has to say about the facts, or perhaps have no idea whether such facts even exist. In the end, nutrition science is a big field. We can't know everything, and certainly not all at once. But we CAN start to put the biased beliefs away -- and embrace learning, critical thinking, and evidence-based analysis to every eating decision we make.

Look, the truth is there is no magic bullet when it comes to healthy nutrition, but there are plenty of well-known scientific nutrition facts based on biochemistry and how people react to foods and their environment; and these facts are used to determine sound nutrition principles that if applied well, will help anyone who choses to put in the hard work, yes HARD WORK, (I can hear people slamming their laptops closed or scrolling to the next screen as soon as they read this) achieve their physical success.

In part 02 of this article series I will outline some principles that will no doubt help you along the journey.