Seasonal Fitness for High-Performers

Here’s what we’ll be covering together:

Boost your fitness year-round with our seasonal workout guide! 🌞🍁❄️🌱 Coach Dani covers tips for every season, helping you stay motivated and healthy no matter the weather. Learn how to:

• Adapt your workouts to changing temperatures

• Incorporate seasonal activities into your routine

• Stay motivated during challenging weather

Whether you're a beginner or fitness enthusiast, our expert-backed advice will keep you on track all year. Don't let the seasons derail your fitness goals - click play and discover how to thrive in every season!

Full Transcript

Please note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.

Hello, friends. I'm Danielle Hagerty. And today, I'm your wellness advisor. Since the seasons are changing here in North America, I thought it was a great time to discuss using the seasons as a guide to your physical and mental well- Some of you may be feeling burned out or overwhelmed. You may be looking at the quarter ahead at work and starting to have a little bit of a panic attack. That's okay. It turns out that the secret to breaking free from some of that might be as simple as looking out your window. Life isn't always smooth sailing. So let's talk about how you can slow down to prevent burnout or start recovering from the shock that may be happen in the last few weeks.

By using nature as your guide, you can get back to improved performance productivity and personal fulfillment quite quickly.

You can prevent burnout and injury so that you reach your goals faster. Actually wait, let's try that one again. You can prevent burnout and injuries so that you reach your goals faster. The seasons can influence our energy levels, moods and physical needs. I'll discuss this further and provide tips that you can use right now to align your fitness routine with the seasons and optimize your overall well-being.

Why would you want to use the seasons as a guide? for me, I love looking to nature for inspiration, and there are whole fields of study that are dedicated to finding things in nature. That can guide us with how we build buildings, how we think about mental health, how we perform athletics so much research has been done on trying to translate things that we see in nature every day into how humans function and interact with the world. A few studies made me think about seasonality even more than when I started creating content for this month. One, I found was pretty interesting. It doesn't take much to put you on a better mood when you interact with nature.

They found that 10 minutes of contact with nature showed, observable, improvement in mood. So what does that mean in normal speak? It means that they could actually measure a mood change when they did these studies and found that it was a significant difference after 10 minutes. they conducted three different studies and also found Improvements across seasons, too. So that helps with our conversation today.

Nature related mood effects are fairly new in the research realm, but we're starting to see studies like this pop-up and so why that's interesting to me is, I don't know about you, but sometimes I think it's gonna take a lot of time outside like an hour or a day hike or something. And 10 minutes is actually really doable and easy to fit in your day. so I thought that was pretty interesting to talk about being outside and also that they found it linked to the seasons as well.

Another study that I didn't know before, until I went looking, was that the season that you were born, in may influence your programming inside and what impacts your mood and behavior, all year round.

Scientists noticed that there is a link between when babies are exposed to certain seasons when they're born and how that influences their circadian rhythms and their mental health. And I just thought that was such an interesting idea, almost like astrology, right? But now trying to link it to nature rather than stars and so suppose that that would true. if you're a summer baby, that's giving you your baseline for how you will form habits and develop over the years.

That could also mean that you have some things that you have to overcome, you have to learn new behaviors based on that because you live in a different climate something like that. so I thought that was interesting, too, and linking seasons to when you were born and how that might impact your life and not just the season that you're in today,

So why seasonal fitness? let's suppose you buy into my relationship between nature and seasons and how you're wired and how you go about doing things. Then this is the conversation for you. I really do think there's evidence in my own life of how the more I try to align with the seasons and not fight it. The more my life becomes more flow, right? And it's more natural really to go to different exercise. Even different work like what I like to focus on in winter versus in summer that can change too. And I think that's all related to the energy that you get from that season.

I've noticed that's more. I pay attention. It just seems that I'm able to develop more sustainable habits too. So instead of trying to have summer habits in winter, which is not the same, right? It's more indoor especially for me because I don't like the cold that it was a real challenge to try to keep up that same high intensity, either workouts or pace for doing work or things like that when I just felt gross because it's cold and I just want to hibernate and so I found personally that it helps improve my happiness and helps me make sense of the world a little bit more. How I've applied that to workouts is for one, I enjoy a lot of sports. so I've seen lots of examples.

Of how different disciplines use seasons in their training plans. so, for example, in Triathlon and Powerlifting A lot of athletes scheduled a competitions, their best ones in the fall as sort of a peak to the year, similar to the trees and their fall colors. And then winter becomes a rest and recovery and maintenance kind of season. And then spring starts the cycle of planning, your races for the year picking, which competitions might be practice runs to try out your fuel or maybe you have a new kit for the year so you want to make sure that it's not going to cause any issues.

And then by follow, you're ready to be in that peak performance again So I think, as that's where I picked it up from was the different training plans in those sports And I really think there's a benefit to that There's also the idea of simply switching your training, it from base aerobic, training to anaerobic and doing that anaerobic in a short block. and so, there's these different patterns that you see in sports, Training plans or psychology or things like that. That Don't necessarily call out aligning it to the seasons, but they do just by schedule and habit.

And so that's what got me more curious about. Hey, is there really something to maybe, using that natural energy to pick my activities for the season? And that really has helped me take advantage of indoor and outdoor activities. So I'm a huge fan of being outdoors. So for the longest time, winter is very hard for me because I just didn't know what to do with myself. It's really cold and icy and potentially dangerous outside sometimes. And that's not the type of weather that I like to work out in. And so I get a little bit bored.

Start slacking eating more kind of losing my momentum in winter and so by using the seasonal approach I was able to maybe refocus on things like yoga or strength training or more indoor cardio machine type activities that would help me maintain and actually cross train a little bit too, right with more yoga and stretching than I do the rest of the year.

And so then when the spring comes along, I can switch to outdoors and really get that burst of energy back and start doing outdoor runs, and outdoor bike rides. and not necessarily give up all the indoor training. I try to keep a little bit of a mix or, it rains. So you still need it then too. but I've found I'm able to do more of the activities. I like when I'm not trying to schedule all of them all year long, if I break them into seasons, then that can flip back and forth and keep it interesting all year long to

Summer is my favorite season and that's because water sports are available and there's tons of sunlight, and daylight. So you can go on extended hikes or extended bike rides. I like paddle boarding and kayaking. so summers are great time to work those And so that's something in the dead of winter, not available. So, Summers are great time to add, more variety to your schedule. And with those outdoor activities, it helps me stay connected to nature and that's a big mood booster for me and for anyone, really? And so I think the slower pace, the longer days make summer, a great time to pick some workouts that fit that energy as well.

In fact. For me, summer's not a season that I push, it's more long endurance because I'm managing the heat as well. but it allows me to save her more, too, Even though I'm running and I'm outside, I like the sun on my skin, so that's when I'm soaking it up. It really lets me kind of Be mindful and present in my workouts. And so then, I can get the benefits from that as well. When I'm exercising.

When fall comes around, I get a little hyper. I think the energy changes For me. And so then I'm looking for more high, intensity things and so hit workouts. Or something. I enjoy in the fall. I also like doing. Bikerides through the rolling hills around here because we have great leaves and so you can combine some of that little hill training and interval training with your fall leaf peeping. So that's one way to incorporate the season with your exercise. I just really believe our bodies are in tune with nature. And so, as the seasons change, our energy changes that impacts mood, our physical needs. And so, I think there's a lot of

gain in aligning, your fitness routine to the seasons to help you. productive, stay balanced, and stay kind of away from things that are gonna send you to a burnout state.

So, how do you get started with aligning your workouts to the seasons? depending on where you are on the globe today, you could be in summer, or spring. So we'll cover all of them that way you can use this as a reference, every three months. So for us fall is coming or has come depending on where you're located. And so that makes it a great time for maybe strength and resilience training.

You can set specific strength goals this time of year if you're pressed for time. Think about doing full body workouts and that'll help you enhance your overall strength and posture and structure. keeping it in a short time period, especially if you're balancing that with end-of-year work assignments, Stress this time of year starts to rise, As we think about maybe family activities around holidays end of your work. Just the general rush to the end of the calendar year too. I think causes some stress for some folks so it's a good time to think about things that reduce stress and one that I think is really neat comes out of Japan and the concept is forest bathing.

And so if you live in an area with leaves that are changing, this is a great time of year to try it. But all it means really is going out and walking through the forest and really being present listening to the birds and seeing the leaves. And the Smell of the forest and using that to reduce your stress and improve your mood.

Sometimes fall can get a little foggy, right? We start getting some rain in the forecast and some low-hanging clouds, but you don't have to be foggy. This time of year, there are some ways to get your focus back as well. So if you're having a problem with some mental fog, There are plenty of activities this time of year that can help enhance that mental clarity. You could use rock climbing. I actually just saw a local intro to rock climbing class that was scheduled. So that's something that might be available to you or martial arts. Maybe it's a good time to check out a martial arts. Practice near you and give that a try. So fall is a great time to think about strength, training, focus, And any peak activities, you want to get out of your system before. Winter comes

All right, winter and winter is a time for rest and reflection. Most climates are getting pretty cold. There might be ice snow conditions that maybe could be dangerous if you go outside. so it's a good time to think about Things that might be conducive to indoors and whole natural world is slowing down and hibernating. so thinking about things that restore your energy or our low impact are great for winter. So that could be a 15 minute morning yoga session to start your day. so that you start out centered and focused, it's a great time to maybe build in some stretching habits into your daily practices. low impact activities like walking. It's a

Winter can be a time where people are short on vitamin D. and so going for an outdoor walk every day as we talked about earlier, maybe just a 10 minute walk Could be enough to really help you get through winter. I actually, Did a vitamin panel with my doctor a couple years ago, and I didn't know this until we did that, but I'm low on vitamin D naturally. so it helped me realize that I need to prioritize walking outside and I added a supplement just to give me that little extra insurance. That I stay at the right levels for vitamin D, so, that's definitely something that we need as human beings. So getting it naturally outside through sunshine, or adding a supplement. Might be a good for your mood boosting as well.

Some folks actually like winter sports one day, I promise I will get there, I'm trying. So there's plenty of winter sports. You could do skiing snowboarding even exploring the low intensity ones like snowshoeing. And it's an easy way to give you an adventure while absorbing sunlight. so there are plenty of winter sports if that's more your speed that you can do through winter as well. To keep your mood up and your fitness going.

Winters a good time to pick up mindfulness too. So if you haven't started that, maybe put it on your winter, do list. and think about, could you do a 10 minute meditation every day? There's also active ways to improve focus, like Tai Chi to. It's a great sports I guess. Practice to improve your focus and reduce your stress. And I don't know about you but I tend to have a lot more brain fog and decision fatigue in winter because I'm just not feeling it from the low energy in general. So, all of these are great ways to elevate your energy and help you get through any of that fatigue. That sets in.

All right, spring is a beautiful time for new beginnings and challenges just like the flowers started to come out of the ground and the green leaves. Coming back on the trees. Spring is a great time to boost your energy and productivity through. Maybe trying some new activities like high intensity training, as you're coming out a winter, easing back into a higher energy, fitness plan might be a good way to change your lunch break, or

Maybe take advantage of the longer days now that the sun is starting to shine a bit longer. Spring is also a great time to start new things, because it has kind of that fresh start feel to it and research has shown. And when you link new habits to fresh starts, or things like that, it can be easier to form them and to keep them going. so maybe think of spring as the time when you want to introduce something new to your workout routine. And use that natural energy to make it stick. There's longer days so that's helpful because that can help you start building, your outdoor runs or walks. Maybe go a little bit further than you were in winter because you have more daylight.

Also gets you back out in the sunlight to help with that, vitamin D to. So that's a great time of year to start thinking about longer workouts outside.

And like I said, earlier, it's a great time to try new things. So maybe a new fitness class A different type of exercise, maybe you always liked biking and now it's time to try running. Or maybe you've never tried swimming. So what is something you're curious about and try that as spring comes? One thing to think about also since in winter you may have been hibernating is any exercise that improves your posture and core would be good to get the kinks out from That winter nap, they all so improve focus and reduce fatigue and that can help with long work hours to

and I love summer. There's so much natural energy. The day The temperature is warm. So for me summer is The easiest. Season for me to work out in because it matches my natural energy levels and interests.

Obviously high times of day are not recommended for intense exercise, but you usually have a good morning or evening to work with So you can start your day with a bk Intensity workout that can kick start your energy and summer. It's a great time to think about things that help you feel happy and motivated. So maybe some team sports with your colleagues to foster relationships. It's a great time for water-based sports like I said earlier, so, maybe explore running on the beach or a volleyball game or, swimming or paddling in some sort. Anything that feels like play, right? That would make it a lot of fun to work out. And enjoy the summer weather.

You could squeeze in something at lunch time after work. There's probably at some point, in your day where you could use a break, but very importantly, make sure that you're staying hydrated and protect yourself from the sun. And like I said earlier, please avoid the high heat times of day, when you're doing intense workouts,

So all of this helps you align your fitness to the seasons. And the reason why you might want to consider that is it can help optimize your mental health throughout the year. So try these tips in this video and see if you can make the most of each season to achieve your goals. I do believe that incorporating that into your planning cycle for your fitness will give you that variety will match your energy better and really I think These tips can help you prevent burnout and injury so that you can reach your goals faster in the end. so I do think there's a lot of value here and I hope that you give it a try and that it works for you.

If you want some help figuring out what your seasonal workouts might look like, feel free to schedule consultation with me, I would be happy to figure out what might sound good to you. If you like these tips, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter, so that you hit get these insights regularly, each month and help you optimize your habits. And wellbeing, Your health is the most valuable asset in this world especially with you have a high performing career with all of the stress and pressures that come with it. You don't get more health. You just have to build maintain and take care of what you have and so invest wisely in your well- Use these tips, take care of yourself and watch your personal and professional lives. Flourish as a result.

Thank you for watching and I hope that you tell me how it goes. I know.