This time of year, exercise may have become a dim memory. It’s cold and windy outside, we’ve gotten busy with the holiday season and missed our gym workouts, the flu season has hit and either you or a family member has been sick…the list goes on and on. Shorter days in the winter months contribute to a sense of malaise, with less sunlight. Lower temperatures make us swaddle ourselves in deep-pile coats which, I think, has the subconscious effect of making us want to hibernate. The weight creeps up, the muscle tone disappears (all too quickly), and by Christmas, we wonder why we have no energy. But even a little bit of exercise can boost your overall feeling of health.

Muscle Tone

It seems that muscle tone is the first to go when we quit working out. But, it’s also the first to come back. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh or how out of shape you are, when you get even the simple exercise of walking, your muscle tone almost immediately seems to improve. Muscles tighten up for a little while and, admit it, you feel better – like you’re a little stronger. This feeling may not be apparent until after you’ve had a couple of Advil and caught your breath, but it’s there. That quick, if short-lived reward of some muscle tone can make you feel better.

Circulation

Ok, so a walk around the park is out of the question, but that glider or treadmill needs to be dusted off. When you go for 10 or 15 minutes on your walker, you pump more blood through your body than you have in the previous 3 hours of sitting at your desk. In fact, doctors are now recommending that if you have a desk job, you should get up and just walk around the office for about 10 minutes every 2 hours. If your boss doesn’t like that, then standing at your desk takes the load off, and redistributes the blood flow. Your heart is stimulated, toxins are flushed out, and oxygen is rushed through your body. You’ll immediately feel better.

Stress

All of the hibernation instincts that envelop us in cold weather also serve to trigger another feeling – stress. It’s stressful because we CAN’T hibernate! We have to go on about our daily activities as if nothing is slowing us down. And, stress is not just a feeling – it is a physiological response our body undergoes. Once again, simply walking may be the answer. A vigorous workout, if you are up to it, is certainly good for stress. You can exert yourself, exhausting your muscles and pushing your circulatory, pulmonary, and cardiac systems to purge themselves of built up lethargy, which leaves no room for stress.

But if you’re not up to that, the simple act of engaging your body in a quickly paced walk will cause all of your systems to work together, forgetting the burden of excess weight, excess debt, and excess “everything else” that piles up during our hibernation months. In other words, you’ll just plain feel better.

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About the author: Laura Green loves to keep fit. When she isn’t writing articles helping others to keep fit you can usually find her working for Yeotown a Fitness Boot Camp in southwest England.