Indoor Workouts for Winter Fitness
By: Lauren Sonderegger, MD – Family Medicine, Obstetrics
Physical activity in the winter? Brrr! Winter is cold and it can be harder to get motivated to get outside to walk, jog or bike ride. However, with little or no equipment, you can get a great workout at home or even at work.
Excellent free workouts abound online. Check out this list of the top 50 free online home workout resources: https://makeyourbodywork.com/how-to-exercise-at-home/
A few of my favorites include:
Pop sugar: fitness videos but also a full health blog. Many workouts reproduced into written instructions and pictures. Pop Sugar Fitness also has a YouTube channel of workout and dance videos.
Fitness Blender:wide array of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), strength, Pilates, yoga and cardio workouts of varying lengths and difficulty levels, from the everyday fitness couple Daniel and Kelli.
SparkPeople Fitness: Short videos (5-15min) of a variety of types of home workouts without equipment, including abs, cardio, yoga, pilates.
BeFit: yoga workouts and meditations with famous instructors like Billy Blanks, Jane Fonda.
Yoga with Adriene:Yoga with a purpose to help people manage their emotions to live life better. Check out “Yoga for when you’re in a bad mood.”
Blogilates: Sassy and hilarious instructor with fun bodyweight workouts, such as “Holiday Squat Challenge” and “Swimsuit Slimdown” series.
Create a Fit Game Jar!
Fill a jar with 15-20 workouts you found on fitness websites or magazines. Pull a different Fit Games workout daily, and the jar must be emptied by the last day of the month. Reward yourself –with a massage, a movie night, a wool sweater for your dog?—when you empty the jar.
Exercise at work!
There are plenty of exercises you can do without leaving your desk. For example, to work your lower abs, sit straight up in your desk chair, extend your right leg, and lift it until your thigh is no longer touching the chair. Repeat six times on each leg. You can also swap your desk chair for a stability ball, which will have your core working all day long.
Set an alarm every hour to get up and walk briskly around the building or outside for 6 minutes. Do this five times, and you’ve walked 30 minutes today.
Shovel snow or mow the lawn!
A 155-lb person shoveling snow for 30 minutes can burn 200 calories. Protect your back, however; (Check out this article on proper form for shoveling snow: https://www.wikihow.com/Shovel-Snow). Mowing the lawn with a push mower—one day winter WILL be over—can burn up to 200 calories, depending on your weight and how long you’re mowing the lawn.
Do your kids have video games? You bought that Xbox for the kids, now you get to take advantage! Get fit with the Nintendo Wii or with Kinnect Fitness Games by Xbox.
