Exercise in the winter

littlefroggy · December 21, 2008

I am having a very hard time getting in any exercise (except for trudging through snow.) I had been swimming 5 days a week, but for the last 2 weeks only went once. Not only did it seem too cold most days to get in the pool, but now I am on day 5 of being essentially snowed in.

I only left the house in the car once, and going to the gym means driving DOWN and back UP the steepest hill in my city.

Aside from going on very cold, chilly walks, what do you do? I haven't room for equipment in my tiny little apartment.

(I saw a PSA on TV about getting exercise in the winter and it made me realize this is probably not just my problem!)

Jachut · December 21, 2008

I'm going to sound like a complete lunatic but I sometimes do "aerobic housework". Lol, when I'm really short on time but want my exercise, I do a weights circuit with my barbell and dumbells but instead of having aerobic intervals on the treadmill, I do really vigorous stuff like wash windows, scrub the kitchen floor by hand, scrub out a shower, or crazy manic vacuum cleaning.

So I might do squats and lunges, wash 2 windows, deadlifts and bent over rows, scrub a floor, pushups and tricep dips, scrub the shower, abdominal work, vacuum the entire house really really fast.

it sounds nuts, I know, but it gets 2 birds killed with one stone and it IS quite active and gets the heart rate up.

Of course, if you have stairs as you would in an aparment, you could mix stair climbing with weights to do a circuit.

Michee · December 21, 2008

Bigger Lunatic Here!

Running in extremely cold temperature is soooo invigorating. It has helped me really decrease my times, and the number of walk breaks, and the duration of walk breaks.

2 weeks ago we ran in 20 below, yesterday we ran in 15 below. I highly recommend it to anyone. It is better than running in the heat.