5 Ways to Maintain Your Fitness This Winter

Lots of places are shutting down, and the snow will be coming down heavily soon. It can feel like you’re about to lose all of your “summer bod” progress because of the cards we’re dealt in the winter season.

You don’t have to lose all your progress. Everyone has highs and lows, but in the end, the most important thing is to maintain your consistency.

I’ve been working out throughout the coldest winters in Chicago for the past eight years and haven’t lost a step in my fitness goals. If maintaining the body you’ve worked so hard on is your goal, read on.

Develop a Plan First and Foremost

Hoping and praying to stay in shape does no one any good. It’s key to create a plan you enjoy and can stick with. For some people, that’s high cardio, and for others, that’s free-weight strength training.

Here are some of the best forms of exercise you can do this winter

Meditation

Yoga

Strength Training

Cardio

Flexibility

In this article, I’m going to dive into a full-workout regime you can personally use to maintain your fitness and conserve your health.

1. Meditation

Meditation is an excellent way to lower your blood pressure and relax your muscles. Back in the early 2000s, I attended Tae Kwon Do training, and my grandmaster had the students meditate for two minutes before class.

It serves as a huge stress reliever. The power of meditation extends beyond your arms and legs — it goes further beyond that and benefits deep inside you.

A clear mind is a healthy mind, and a healthy mind leads to a healthy body.

If you’re loaded with stress from family, school, or work, then meditation is a great place to start. There are hundreds of YouTube videos to guide you through a meditation session. There’s also the Headspace app that is calming and has visuals to put you at peace.

Meditation is a vital way to purify and quiet the mind, thus rejuvenating the body.

— Deepak Chopra

2. Yoga

Yoga has been very beneficial to my health ever since the first time I discovered it. My mom invited me to a free session of “hot yoga,” in which the room temperature was above 90 degrees, and it relaxes all the muscles.

Hot yoga isn’t for me because I basically flooded the entire room with my sweat and felt insecure about it.

Doing yoga is another mindful exercise that works the body.

Yoga improves your strength and balance tremendously. It also helps with back pain relief. It helps you sleep better and relieve stress.

YouTube is an excellent source of yoga sessions that will allow you to follow along to the best of your ability and reward your body without having to do anything high-intensity.

Some of my favorite yoga poses include bridge, downward dog, warrior two, and the high lunge. Explore all the poses and find what works best for you and your body.

Yoga is not a work-out it is a work-in, and this is the point of spiritual practice to make us teachable to open up our hearts and focus our awareness so that we can know what we already know and be who we already are.

— Anoynomous

3. Strength Training

Gaining and maintaining strength can come in many forms, but the method that has worked best is free-weight body workouts.

The army taught me numerous body workouts because we don’t always have easy access to a gym when we’re out in the field. Our bodies are a tremendous tool we can use to work for us instead of against us.

The most common strength training I recommend to beginners, or intermediate levels include push-ups to strengthen your arms, sit-ups to strengthen your abs, and 2-minute planks for the core.

Again, we’re trying to maintain here. The spring and summer are when we can go all out and really pick up workouts at a regular gym or a CrossFit complex.

You can follow along on YouTube for some excellent strength training walkthroughs. If you’ve ever heard of Sean T., he runs the Insanity workout program that has helped millions of people achieve their fitness goals.

I go to the gym and do 75 pull ups, 75 dips, 150 squats, 150 pushups, and then 20 minutes of ab work. Done. It takes an hour; I’m in and out. I sweat the whole time.

— Charlie Hunnam

4. Cardio

Whether you're a novice or you’ve run 20 marathons, cardio is important for the heart. It’s good to push your body to high-intensity levels otherwise, you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for.

Think about the early mornings you had in the summer when you ran at the track and avoided eating junk food afterward. Maintain, maintain, maintain.

My favorite form of cardio is running, and this all started when I was a first-grader, and we had races to the fence and back after a whistle was blown. Running carried into cross-country in college, and now it’s my hobby.

Some of the best forms of cardio you can do right from your bedroom include air squats, burpees, intense core workouts, and high knees. Everything you do doesn’t require equipment.

Cardio only requires determination and consistency to maintain everything you’ve worked hard for.

By exercising for 10 minutes with intensity and effort, you’ll be more likely to give your body what it needs to keep adapting, building muscle, and increasing your capacity. Ten minutes a day is enough to actually give you a great workout.

— Andy Petranek

5. Flexibility

Stretch your body out every day. It starts when you wake up in the morning. You need to relieve your muscles' tension from the night before starting your day with a spark.

Before every sporting event I’ve ever competed in, my team was required to stretch. Every run I go for, I stretch. Flexibility goes a long way and allows your body to keep going longer in life.

The most common stretches I do are overhead arm pulls, sitting on the floor in a V and reaching for each foot, standing up lunges, quad stretches, and head and neck rotations.

Every little thing you do in stretching adds up and helps you feel energized for your day. It’s the least intense of workouts but is just as necessary to maintain the progress you’ve made.

Well, being fit is not about flaunting muscles or biceps. Being fit is about flexibility and fit is about flexibility and body composition.

— Prosenjit Chatterjee

Takeaway

Our bodies are fragile and need to be shown love every single day. It requires something but doesn’t require much to maintain.

You can follow the guide I’ve laid out in this article and see how far it takes you. I was 180 pounds when I grinded in the summer, and I’m still 180 pounds here as we approach the winter, and I’ve had to evolve my entire workout regime.

- Meditation

- Yoga

- Strength Training

- Cardio

- Flexibility

You only get one body and one life.

The action you take is just as important as the inaction you don’t take.