Four Fun and Simple Holiday Workout Ideas to Try

As busy as the holiday season is, staying fit by getting in the right amount of physical activity can seem impossible. Increased travel, shopping, and time with family can make it easy to push physical activity to the side. However, if you want to avoid the average weight gain of one to five pounds many see after the holidays, you need to keep it at the top of your priority.

Staying active during the holidays doesn’t need to be difficult or vigorous to see or maintain results. You can keep physical activity a part of your daily routine by thinking outside of the box or using the tools and resources you have around you. However, limiting yourself to the gym or activities that don’t involve others can make it harder to stick to a physical routine during the holidays.

Here are three fun and simple holiday workout ideas to try this year to stay fit and active:

Join a Holiday Themed Marathon or Event

Depending on location, there are many holiday-themed runs or events to attend. These runs make you get fit together as you dress up or go through a themed route. You can even join holiday-themed virtual runs from the comfort of your own home by downloading the Virtual Races application on your smartphone.

Try the 12-Days of Fitness Challenge

This challenge uses the “12-Days of Christmas” song and gift-giving idea into a fitness challenge to encourage you to stay more fit this year. Each day you follow along with a certain fitness routine that increasingly gets more difficult, just like the song. For example, on day one, you could start with one jumping-jack, one push-up, and a one-minute plank, then on day two, you increase each of those exercises by two. Then repeat the pattern until you make it to day 12. Finally, you can determine the exercises you do.

Get Dancing

You don’t need to dance like a professional to get benefits. Instead, turn on Christmas music or your favorite holiday tunes and get moving with everyone or by yourself. Dancing is a fun and highly rewarding physical activity that doesn’t feel like exercise at all.

Gift Wrap Relay Runs

You can do this alone or with others in the family. However, be sure they are not wrapping their own gift. To do this, start by gifting one or two gifts. Then jog in place or up and down your hallway for the same amount of time it took you to wrap the gifts. If others join you, grab a gift or two for them to wrap before you run to start the relay. Then repeat the process until all the gifts are wrapped.

As you can see, adding workouts to your holiday routines and activities is easy with the right tools and resources. In addition, many of these fun activities can be modified to do alone or with anyone around at any time to keep everyone active during the holidays this year.