Your Health

Maximizing Your Cold Weather Workouts

Posted: 2/9/2012

You don't need weights to exercise. You can use anything heavy with a handle, such as liquid laundry detergent or bleach containers.

(NAPS)— During the colder months, many people can warm up to these four simple tips from celebrity fitness expert Jennifer Cohen to help keep up with their workouts:

• Incorporate Exercise Throughout Your Day: Put free weights at the doorway of your bedroom and move them from room to room as you go about the day, doing a few arm curls each time. At the end of the day, you’ll have a great upper body workout.

• Double Your Trips Up and Down the Stairs: Have to move laundry? Do it in two trips with small baskets instead of one, to burn extra calories and work your hamstrings and glutes.

• Take Advantage of TV Time: Keep a stretch band in the living room and do lunges to work on your arms, thighs and butt while you watch TV. Put the band under your foot and pull up with your arms.

• Outdoor Chores Count, Too: Taxing yard work such as raking leaves and cleaning gutters, chopping wood, scraping the windshield or shoveling snow can count toward fitness and weight loss. Rake leaves for an hour to burn 250 calories and shovel snow for an hour to burn up to 400 calories.

Cohen says cool fitness gadgets can be great for motivation. By using a heart rate monitor, for example, you can track your intensity level, calories burned and duration—regardless of whether it’s yard work or an in­tense workout session. At the gym, heart rate monitors can track your progress on whatever equipment you’re using —exercise bikes, stair-steppers — or during a group exercise class.

Heart rate is a convenient, accurate, personalized indicator of the intensity of your exercise. Using a heart rate monitor lets you set your goal, create a training program and use your exercise data to adjust the intensity of your workout accordingly. A Polar heart rate monitor can help bring your workouts to the next level by optimizing time spent at the gym, exercising at home or doing outdoor chores.

It’s also important to exercise with a goal in mind, whether that goal is weight loss, improving your general fitness or maximizing your performance for a sporting event. Create a training program to help you meet your goal that includes both cardio and strength training. You can devise a customized workout plan via free sites such as polarpersonaltrainer.com.

Learn More

For more on heart rate training, visit www.polarusa.com/whyHR.

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