As the days get shorter and colder this winter season, opportunities to power-walk on the Walnut Beach boardwalk or ride a bike along the Woodmont coastline can dwindle. At the same time, the holidays make it easy to overeat—and pack on the pounds.
But health and fitness experts in Milford say keeping an exercise regimen at home can be as simple as pushups against your kitchen counter or following along with a fitness coach on YouTube.
“There’s so many things that you can modify to be able to get a full body workout right in your home,” says Linda Gottlieb, owner of Fit Training, a personal training service. “Your kitchen is a wonderful place to do pushups against the counter,” she says. “The counter is not going to move; it’s stable. You can do pushups against the counter if it’s not in your inclination or your fitness ability to get on the floor and do a pushup.”
Don’t own free-weights? Gottlieb suggests grabbing a couple of one-pound tomato cans from the cabinet and flexing with them. Need some indoor cardio? Bring the laundry downstairs in small batches instead of one large load, taking the stairs several times. “You don’t have to be running them; you can walk them with hands on the rail,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be something that’s extreme or intense.”
And it doesn’t need to be expensive, either, according to Joe Romano, owner of MoJoe’s Gym, an appointment-only exercise facility on Old Gate Lane.
“You could invest in a $20 set of bands or a couple of really light free-weights, and you could get a really good workout,” Romano explains. “And if you don’t know how to do that on your own, if you’re not a fitness professional and you haven’t really exercised at home with your own body weights and are not using machines, you know there’s plenty of things you could look up online.” He and other fitness pros pointed to YouTube as having an abundance of free, trainer-led workout videos.
“Pick up a dumbbell set and some elastics, find an online fitness person that you enjoy, and do that once a week, twice a week, something like that,” says Brian Williams, owner of Center Rehabilitation and Sports Therapy, LLC on Hill Street.
“Routine is important in our lives,” Williams explains. “Most folks have a family they’re juggling around or stuff that happens on a schedule on some level, so you want to figure out a routine that allows for you to do your fitness.” He suggested 30- to 40-minute varied exercise sessions three times a week as “really doable for most folks.”
For weight loss, counting calories is even more important than a good cardio workout, Romano confirms. “I think the thing to realize is the body is like a checking account. If you think of it like that, you’re much better off,” he says. “You want to think of your body having a balance. If it’s 2,000 calories a day, you got $2,000 in the bank. If you start using up all those calories, or you know you’re going to go on a shopping spree over the weekend or for the holidays, you got to start putting your money away so you’re not pulling out your American Express and charging things that you got to pay back later.”
The way to “earn” those calories back, he said, is through exercise. “If you have access to be able to earn some calories, like some type of interval- or cardio-based fitness program at home that you can do, that would really earn some calories for you moving up to holiday (or special event) eating,” he says. “Right before those events, kind of making sure you have a balance available to you, if you will, is very important for people.”
For more information about the fitness professionals mentioned in this article, visit fittraining.net, mojoesgym.com or centerrehab.com.
