Navigating the Festive Season
STRATEGIES TO MAXIMISE HOLIDAY HEALTH AND HAPPINESS
Housekeeping:
This is the last newsletter for this year with the first next year due to hit your inbox on Saturday, January 13th.
I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas, and a safe and happy New Year.
As ever, thanks for reading.
Holidays are traditionally a time of indulgence.
You submit your ‘festive season’ hall-pass, push your goals to one side, and see where you end up on the flip side. Usually nowhere good.
Not an admonishment. I’ve as bad a track record as anyone and, more to the point, far be it from me to judge how anyone may wish to spend their time. As a fitness and nutrition coach, my role begins and ends only in helping to align intention and behaviour, or highlighting discrepancies thereof. If you decide you want to go nuts over the holidays, more power to you.
Only, don’t assume that having a great holiday AND staying on top of things are mutually exclusive.
Indeed, quite the opposite. The holidays signal a rare opportunity for us to have our Christmas Cake and eat it. Not least because of the idea I started with — that holidays are traditionally a time of indulgence.
Traditionally, sure. But it’s pretty hard to claim that with a straight face nowadays, when the indulgence is proposed as a point of difference to the rest of the year. What we’re talking about over the next few weeks amounts to little more than a change of menu. Food, drink, social media — you name it— indulgence is the default. If there’s a difference it’s that at Christmas we over-indulge.
But you can relax. I’m not here to make the case for some ascetic bare-bones Grinchmas.
Nor am I here to solemnly warn that if you decide to throw caution to the wind you’re sacrificing progress. Hard-earned progress. And that will take the shine off a good time.
No. That sort of talk during the holidays sounds far too much like the live-for-fitness crowd to me. And hey, if you want to weigh out your Xmas dinner go for it, but you’re not getting an invite to my knees-up.
In over 13 years of training people, the holiday guidance has forever been: do what you want.
Acknowledgement that when you’ve trained all year, the next few weeks don’t matter. And if you haven’t, they don’t matter either.
But then we’ve all learned a modicum of restraint and a dash of discipline is just that — what we want. Because, as we’ve discovered, throwing caution to the wind is a fantastic way to have a shit holiday.
But then that’s hardly surprising. I don’t have an inside line to the Big Guy but this surely has to be the reason for ascetic practices like Lent, and indeed, Advent. Yeah, yeah, there’s the contemplation, the spiritual discipline and other boring stuff, but, c’mon.
Easter didn’t kick off until the 2nd century and Christmas didn’t really get rolling for another 700 years but, I can tell you, in that whole time there was a real lack of options in the ‘Party’ sections of department stores. And even less online.
So what do you do when you want to mark a special occasion and you’ve got nothing to bring to the party?
You subtract. You tell everybody they can’t have any good stuff in the lead-up. And then give it back to them to kick off festivities!
It’s genius.
Negative Space for Positive Reasons
We live in a world of relationship: light and dark; up and down; raining and not raining. All meaning of one is contained in the other. Defined both by what it is, and what it isn’t — the negative space.
Ease, comfort, relaxation and pleasure are all well and good, but, as well as being defined by their opposites, they are also best enjoyed in sharp relief.
Neither a lavish meal nor a long, messy night are a problem in isolation. But when Christmas lunch extends into Boxing Day and the day after, and we move from one celebratory meal to the next, or eat and drink unceasingly between meals, we are only getting increasingly diminishing returns on any good time we are trying to have.
Easily solved by making negative space for positive reasons. Pick your moments. The rest of the time stick to normal programming, or better, and give your holiday pleasures the courtesy of a little breathing space, some time to shine.
Remember, it’s not a killjoy it’s a joy maximiser. On that basis alone you’d be mad not to give it a shot.
And if you really want to dial up the good times and have them pay off over the long haul, here’s what you can do with some of that downtime.
Exercise, obviously, is going to help. But not the sort that might otherwise suffix the festive season: that of penance for my caloric sins and resolution-doomed-to-fail variety.
Instead, you can pour the foundation for your fitness practice. By contrast with the conventional approach to fitness — forever going backwards and forwards over the same old ground — you are now in a process of incremental iteration.
Leftfield Training is the reconciling of physiological (and psychological) realities with the reality of our day-to-day lives. As such, time management is our first order of business.
Exercise can best be thought of as a drug — a stimulus to the body and, like any drug, it requires a minimum effective dose (M.E.D.)
Volume and frequency are flexible only to a point. Unfortunately, plenty of professional advice in this sphere — rather than educating and coaching the required change — simply ignores this inconvenient reality. And while receiving payment for their supposed wise counsel, will oversee a program they well know, or should know, will never work.
Much like a doctor prescribing you half a course of antibiotics.
Certainly, the dose varies according to the adaptation you are seeking or looking to preserve. Still, for general fitness, it’s pretty clear-cut. The Goldilocks sweet spot is 150–180 minutes a week. So your training regimen could be any of the following:
3 x 50-60 minutes = 150–180
4 x 30-45 = 150–180
5 x 30-36 = 150–180
6 x 25-30 = 150–180
You can waste months and years never doing quite enough to elicit the cascade of sought-after hormonal and physiological adaptations. And many do.
Our first way of saving time is giving you flexibility in determining your schedule on the right side of effectiveness only. Being that it’s no good to you anywhere else.If you still don’t have time, you’re right. And you never will.
Time has you.
Getting everything done is a fantasy, making your choices thus:
You don’t get everything done AND take care of what’s important.
You don’t get everything done while trying, in vain, to get everything done. And you don’t take care of what’s important.
Leaving but one further decision: Is being fit important to you?
The Space Program
If so, take your standard, run-of-the-mill, normal i.e. not-holiday week and figure out where you can massage in one of the schedules suggested above, noting time set aside exclusively for training need not be the case.
Schedule the time and space you can take now, into the new year, and beyond. A time that works — or as close to it as possible — in otherwise ‘normal’ life. It can and will change but only start a schedule now that you can continue for the foreseeable future.
Then, during your holiday, at that time, get changed into training gear. Signal to yourself and anybody else concerned that this is your training time now, even if not exclusively.
Especially if not exclusively.
Ultimately, you’ll fill this time with resistance exercise, conditioning, power and mobility drills as dictated by the needs of your body As such, I can’t get into specifics here, but as long as you observe The Golden Rule, a skipping rope and Eye of the Tiger would be a great start.
Frankly, what you do now at that time is not important.
Get changed
Every time
Without fail
And do whatever you like. Exercise, sure. But you could go for a walk. Listen to a podcast. Go for a walk and listen to a podcast. Hell, watch Netflix, if you must.
The critical point is that you make the time and take the space. And defend it.
Only when your habit is established will you start exercising for effect. In getting the habit onside first, almost anything will work. If you don’t, nothing will.
When most people begin a program of exercise or any other sort of change, they do this backwards. And they do it many times
When February rolls around and everybody else has fallen off the resolution bandwagon you’ll still be in the early days. This time next year you’ll still be just in the early days. But that’s because you’ll have created a habit of exercise — a fitness practice — that you will have forever.
Make an appointment with yourself. Keep it. And keep on keeping it.
Prove you can do the absurdly simple, but still annoying. At times you won’t want to do it — that’s also the point. But if you can’t do it, you’ve chosen the wrong time. Choose again.
All good things follow action, and you’ll be acting like somebody who exercises. Enough. As a stock-standard part of life.
And if it all sounds like a waste of time, that’s an interesting choice of words.
Happy holidays.
- OLI