Stay Focused And Fit This Holiday Season

As we enter in to the holiday season you will likely find yourself over-committed with office functions, family dinners, holiday shopping, and the typical end of year revelry.

It’s difficult enough to find time to prepare healthy meals and get to the gym the other 11 months out of the year. Between Thanksgiving and New Years it seems nearly impossible.

Now more than ever, you need to prioritize. First and foremost, be realistic in regards to your fat loss efforts. Rather than focusing on weight loss, for the next several weeks focus on maintaining your current weight. Keep in mind that maintaining your weight still requires planning, so the next issue to address is how you should best utilize your limited time.

As your Mother may have told you, you are what you eat.

Your first priority should be your diet. A good nutrition program will enable you to

• improve your body composition
• improve your health
• improve your stamina

Fact is you cannot out train a bad diet. However, you can lose/maintain weight without exercise. If you have limited time on your hands my suggestion is to focus that time on meal planning and preparation.

Keep up with your food journaling and take adequate time to prepare healthy meals. The effort it takes to eat healthy, nutritious meals now is much less than the effort it will take to burn off a Whopper and fries later on.

If time allows, you certainly want to continue with your workouts. If those workouts will be limited use this time to focus on strength training. Why? Because over the course of any given day the bulk of the calories we burn is based on our Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). The more muscle mass we have, the higher our RMR.

If twice per week you can squeeze in an extra 20 minutes at the gym, focus on High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

HIIT is done by alternating brief periods or high intensity work (85% or more) with a brief recovery period. HIIT is an example of an anaerobic exercise, which means that an inadequate amount of oxygen is being delivered to working muscles during the course of the exercise.

When compared to steady-state cardio, HIIT results in significantly more calories burned in a much condensed period of exercise.

To summarize, if you find yourself with limited time over the remainder of this year and are concerned about packing on pounds, your order of priority should be:

1. A focused nutrition plan
2. Strength training
3. High Intensity Interval Training

Wishing those celebrating a very happy holiday!

Train hard; stay strong.

Peace.

Susan

Note: This is a "Best Of" article that originally appeared on Catapult Fitness Blog in November 2008.