BY EBENEZER SAMUEL, CSCS
November and December can wreak serious havoc on your fitness. From travel to parties to family time and plenty of food, the distractions are abundant. You deserve to enjoy them. Simultaneously, you want to preserve your gains. The solution: Enter the holidays with a mental training approach calibrated to the moment. And that means avoiding these three common mistakes.
OVER-PROGRAMMING
Workout programs often feature nuance (think: The pull-push-legs split). That’s great for any time of year when you can commit to focused training. But when you’re juggling traveling and family time, it’s worth scaling back.
That’s the beauty of the full-body workout: Even if you miss a training day or two (or five!) in a given week, you’re still insuring that you’ve attacked all the critical muscles and movement patterns in your body. Focus on efficiency: Think of doing 2 to 3 sets each of goblet squats (pictured below), plank rows, and pushups. Aim for 8 to 10 reps per set.
RELYING ON AB MOVES
Nothing beats bodyweight training when you’re short on time. But often, we fall in love with core exercises. Thing is, planks, V-ups, and situps simply aren’t challenging won’t help you maintain muscle, and they won’t push your heart rate for cardiovascular gains.
Build around multijoint bodyweight moves instead, relying on lunges, pushups, and air squats. One framework: Put 10 minutes on a clock, and do 10 reps of those three moves back-to-back-to-back. Repeat until time’s up.
RELYING ON TOO MUCH EQUIPMENT
I love benches and power racks as much as anyone. But when I visit family, I never plan my training around that gear. Get-togethers may run overtime, gyms may run limited holiday schedules, and mental fatigue may set in.
The solution: Have our own light equipment solution. A few books in a backpack can give you something to row and goblet squat, and a heavy box can set you up for Romanian deadlifts.
You can also pack your SMRTFT dumbbells. No, don’t tote the 100-pound (or 80-pound) set. But do set them to 20 pounds and throw them in your car trunk; it’s a perfect weight for high-rep sets of rows, curls (right here!), and lunges.
No matter what, find ways to keep training. You’ll thank yourself come the start of 2026.