When clients of mine say that they are going on a vacation or going to visit friends and family for the holidays and they want to work out. I recommend that they Think Small.
Think Small means to plan for only a workout of 30 minutes to even 15 minutes in duration. Yes, 15 minutes. Whether on vacation on the beach or at your family’s Thanksgiving dinner at Granny’s. I know sometimes it's hard to take out an entire hour to get your pump on! When you Think Small, you can plan a workout and not stress all day on when you are going to have time to get your regular one hour HIIT sweat routine while being away from “The Fam”. The stress of worrying about when you can get that hour workout, I find, usually results in postponing the workout to another day.
It helps to also focus less about using equipment. This is a great time to go through that awesome bodyweight-only workout your personal trainer did with you a month ago.
One last thing about Think Small workouts (ok, two last things) is that you won’t lose a lot of your fitness or strength gains because you were on that two week vacation in Barcelona. I like to think of this approach as a way to keep things in check to prevent your fitness level from falling from 100% to 50%. With a Think Small workout you may only lose 10% to 15% of your fitness progress. Ideally, you may not lose any fitness at all because it maybe just what your body needed - a light workout - for once.
The second thing is that once you get that Think Small workout in, the rest of the day you are going to feel AWESOME!!!
Most importantly, I encourage you to have fun working out and spending time with your friends and family during the holidays.
John Dorosario, is a certified personal trainer in Chicago. He enjoys working with his clients in assisting them with their fitness goals through creating a personalized, fun and creative workout.
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