Embracing Grace for Yourself This Holiday Season

The Holiday season can deter many of us from our self-care routines. Parties, shopping, extra meal preparations, and travel can mean missing your beloved group fitness class, skipping workouts, forgetting to stretch, and so on. Eating patterns also likely change, and you may find yourself consuming more sugar, or food on the run, than you do normally.

There is going to be a lot of fitness, health, and wellness advice, challenges, and products out there to help you "stay on track" during the Holidays. Those are all fine, but I also know they can create a lot of pressure. The threat of "losing all your gains" can feel like a lot of weight to carry, in addition to the regular old Holiday stress. But, I have an additional message: Give yourself some GRACE this Holiday season. Try to keep up with your self-care routines around fitness and health, but also, don't cycle into a pit of self-hate if you don't workout for a week, or two....

Seriously, it takes 1-2 weeks off to start to notice any real decrease in cardiovascular conditioning, and muscle strength tends to decline after 2.5-3 weeks of deconditioning (e.g., not doing any workouts). In fact, it actually takes two to eight months of inactivity for virtually all fitness gains to be erased. Now, I'm not advocating a couple of months of inactivity here, but I do want to highlight the that nothing will be all that lost with a few missed workouts and extra meals.

And honestly, maybe it does your body better to not stress and beat yourself up about missing workouts while visiting the in-laws or having those extra helpings of cheesy potato casserole. Stress hormones cause all sorts of health and fitness problems, from inflammation and pain to stubborn weight loss/gain. So, maybe skip the extra dose of stress hormone (I mean, Holidays offer enough!), and give yourself some grace.