Winter is here, and depending on where you live, you might be dealing with snow, ice, and freezing temperatures, or you might be excited about the winter activities that aren’t available during other seasons. For those who love being active but don’t enjoy the cold, staying active can be challenging during this time of year.
If you’re not a fan of snow but still want to stay active, consider embracing winter sports, picking up new outdoor hobbies, modifying your favorite summer sports, or finding ways to stay active indoors.
To figure out what activities are best for you in the winter, think about what you enjoy doing in the summer. If you love hiking, canoeing, or swimming, you might enjoy winter sports like snowshoeing, skiing, or ice skating. These activities can be fun, break up the winter monotony, and help you stay active.
Instead of cranking up the heat and hibernating all winter, try a new sport to keep your interest in the outdoors alive and stay active in a fun way. Some winter activities are more rigorous than others, but you don’t always need a full-body workout. Winter hobbies like making snow angels, building snowmen, and sledding can encourage you to spend time outside and stay somewhat active. Metal detecting, ice fishing, bird watching, and photography also require spending time outdoors and moving around, even if the exercise isn’t intense.
If you usually spend an hour a day hiking or walking your dog in the summer, you might not feel satisfied with just making snow angels or bird watching, but these are still options to get outside and stay moving. You don’t have to give up your favorite summer activities just because it’s cold; you might just need to modify them.
You can still go camping, jogging, bike riding, and rock climbing in the winter with a few adjustments. Even surfing is possible with winter wetsuits. Staying active outdoors doesn’t have to stop because of the cold; you can adapt your favorite activities to the winter weather. For example, you can snowshoe to a winter campsite, jog with warmer clothes, use wider bike tires, or find a different rock climbing location.
For those who really can’t handle the cold or just don’t want to go outside, staying active indoors is still an option. Just because you can’t run around outside doesn’t mean you can’t work out. You can join a gym, buy a home workout machine, do a Wii workout, or focus on easy at-home exercises. While outdoor winter activities are great, they might not be suitable for your daily workout.
Some people prefer to stay indoors and complete their workouts at home rather than bundling up and attempting to snowshoe. You can prepare a workout routine with crunches, pushups, and lunges in your living room or do some at-home yoga to stay active while staying warm.
The key is to keep moving during these months, which can be the hardest time to stay active. For those who prefer activities over a gym routine, it can be easy to become less motivated. But with options like winter sports, outdoor hobbies, modifying summer activities, and indoor workouts, you can stay active during the winter, even if it means doing something instead of just watching Netflix under a blanket at home.
