How to Stay on track during the Christmas holidays + free training to do at home when your
gym is closed!

Holidays are just around the corner. I love Christmas, I see it as a much-needed break from the
usual routine. You spend time with your extended family, you get to sleep in late and most of all,
you get to eat and drink delicious food and alcoholic beverages. Holidays are made for that, it’s
a time to relax and let yourself go a little bit. Missing a few training sessions and indulging in food and
drinks for a few parties will not have a significant impact on your training or your diet, but
there are a few things you need to watch out for if you want to make sure you don’t lose all the
momentum you’ve been building on over the last weeks or months.

Training has to be done periodically over long periods of time in order to improve. Missing one
week of training or going to a few parties won’t affect you too much in the grand scheme of
things. It may take months to lose the fat, build the muscle or get the performance gains you’re
looking for, and if you don’t improve for a week it is not the end of the world so don’t stress too
much about it. Luckily Maintaining takes a lot less effort. Depending on your level it could take as
little as two 45 minutes of training sessions a week to maintain your level of fitness. Whereas to really
improve optimally you could do as many as 7 workouts (if you workout 7 times a week I really
hope you know what you’re doing or that you’re being supervised by a competent kinesiologist).
Maintaining is actually quite easy and if you can’t go to the gym during the holidays, doing 2 to 3
training sessions at home per week is probably all you need. You probably won’t make any progress
with those workouts but at least you won’t feel like you’ve taken a step back when you go back
to the gym. Ideally, when you go back to the gym after the holidays you’d like to pick things off
where you left them and if you feel your fitness level has decreased during the holidays it might
affect your motivation. There are many ways to stay motivated with your training but having to take
a step back because your fitness level decreased isn’t one of them.

Training is also a thing of habit, at first, it’s hard to make time for it but once it’s something you
do on a regular basis it just becomes part of your routine. Breaking the routine is great, doing
the same thing every day would be boring and that’s why we have holidays, but when it comes
to training, if you break the habit for too long it can become hard to start again. Not only will you
have to restart your training with lower weights and less volume but you will have to find the
time to fit it into your schedule again. Personally, I try to keep training all the time, during summer, I
find it harder to go all out in the gym 3-4 times a week. There are so many activities to do and I’d
rather spend time outside hanging out with friends than in the gym. So during summer, I might
kick it back a little on my training but I never fully stop. I know that if I fully stop it is just going to
be so much harder to start again. It could take me one or two months just to get back to the
level of fitness I was before and It is really demotivating to struggle to lift weights you could lift
easily a few months before. So if you already found that fitting training into your life was difficult,
I suggest you don’t stop training for too long. A week without training won’t affect your
performance, after all, every athlete’s training plan has planned weeks called deload where they
reduce their training volume and intensity in order to fully recover from a hard training cycle
(usually every 4-6 weeks). Two weeks without training and your performance might start to
deteriorate. Three weeks without training and your performance will most definitely deteriorate.

But what about nutrition? Changing your body composition also takes time. A few dinners and
parties won’t affect it in a very significant matter. Sure you gain fat if you eat too many calories,
but you have to do it regularly over a long period of time to gain a significant amount of it. If you
weigh yourself the morning after your Christmas party and you gained five pounds, I got good
news for you it is impossible to gain that much fat in a single night. There’s one thing that can
fluctuate that much with a single meal: water. Quick weight changes are almost always due to
water weight. If you ate salty foods, loads of carbs, and drank a lot, your body will retain more
water. It has to balance out everything. If there’s more salt or glycogen in your body, it will
inevitably retain more water. Having a high level of water retention will make your physique look
more bloated and it’s one of the reasons why sometimes you wake up looking more bloated.
Bodybuilders will actually prep specifically to reduce their amount of body water to look as dry
as possible when it's time to get on stage. To achieve that they will actually limit their salt and
water intake to the lowest amount possible. What you risk the most by going overboard in
dinners and parties is that you might lose the healthy habits you worked hard to develop. It’s
one thing to indulge a few times but if you eat cake and foie gras every day during the whole
Christmas holidays you might gain a little bit of fat and you might find it hard to go back to
healthier eating habits when the holiday is over. Some people do It naturally, they will either be
reasonable 100% or when they go overboard with their calorie intake they will simply eat less
the following days to balance things out. I’m more like the second type, I occasionally allow my
self to binge eat if I want to but if I do it I will probably reduce my calorie intake or increase my
energy expenditure the next days. To me, that’s not being restrictive with my eating, that’s being
sensible and reasonable.

Recommendations

So now that we know the risks of slacking for too long here’s what I recommend to everyone
during the holidays. Take a break, relax, go see your friends and family and enjoy a great meal
with them, but also go do some exercise. It can be a home workout, you could go to the gym
maybe once or twice if they are still open. But what would be the best is to go outside with your family,
go for a walk, go ski, skate, or slide down a hill with a crazy carpet. Anything that will keep you
moving while spending time with your family. Nutrition wise I would recommend that you don’t
restrict yourself. Enjoy the holidays, it's also about eating, drinking, and enjoying! But the day after a party
it might be a good idea to enjoy lighter foods like fruits vegetables and lean protein. Don’t force
yourself to eat if you’re not hungry. I know for example that after a big dinner the next day I
might not be hungry until lunchtime the next day, so you know what, I might just skip breakfast.
You probably don’t need more carbs and fat if you already ate a load of it the night before. If you
feel hungry by all means go ahead and eat, my point is that you should listen to your body and if
you’re not hungry it might just mean it is still trying to process last night’s dinner. It’s a good idea
when it comes to nutrition to think more about what your body needs than what your mind
wants.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Bonus free Home bodyweight training to do over the holidays

Leg exercise: Bodyweight squat, Split Squat, Bulgarian split squat

Chest exercise: Wall pushups, pushups on your knees, inclined push up, Regular pushups

Leg exercise: Glute bridge, Hip thrusts, One leg hip thrust

Back exercise: Door Frame rows

Core exercise: Plank, Plank 1 foot up, plank one foot one arm up

Leg exercise: Stair step up

Cardio: Jumping jacks, high knees, inside out, frog jumps.

Copy/Paste the link below to get your FREE training template!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sCt93EeB0gC_f0OAYK0p2Ze-bBYZkKx0/view?usp=sharing