The Christmas season is approaching and with it comes holidays, parties, snacks, family, travel, etc. It’s a challenging time of year for anyone who is trying to change their lifestyle by eating better and getting regular exercise. Odds are you won’t have time to go, or even have access to a gym.

You’re probably thinking it’s hopeless. You will fall off the wagon and have to start all over in January. But don’t despair! This isn’t a time of falling behind; it’s an opportunity to leap ahead. Pick one of your weak areas that you can work on at home (or anywhere!) and devise a plan to make it a strength for the new year.

I will give you an example of how this might work. Let’s take pushups. Day 1, do as many as you can do as a test. Let’s say you got 20. Now what you’ll do, is for the next 5 days or so, you’ll do 10 pushups every hour throughout the day. After a few days of that, you will do 11 or 12 pushups every hour, then 13 or 14. Keep increasing the amount you do. The idea here is that you don’t ever feel like you’re “maxing” out on any of the sets. Before you know it, you will be doing sets of 20+ with ease, still not feeling like you’re maxing out. Once you get up to your old max for these “easy” sets you do all day, take a day off, and then do another max test and see how much you’ve improved.

Make sense? Remember, the idea is to not feel like it’s getting hard for any of these little sets you do during the day. Keep it easy, but regularly add more reps every couple of days. Maybe the first few sets or the first day that you add a rep or two feels a bit like work, but keep at it and it get easier. Then you add more.

This also isn’t something that you only do for a short time, or only do for 1 thing. This can work for almost anything. Burpees, situps, pullups, squats, pistols… Whatever you want to be able to do more of, this is a good way to get there.  It’s what we call “greasing the groove”. You get a lot of volume, and a lot of practice, at a specific skill or movement without reaching the point of muscular failure. If you max out every time, you then need a lot more time for your muscles to recover. By keeping the work sub-maximal, recovery time is cut way down and you can get a lot of work put into it.

This type of program does take time and patience. I would limit it to one item at a time. You’ll be tempted to do this program for 3 or 4 weak areas at once, but this is going to put a lot more strain on you and again, you will need more recovery time to maintain it. If you go back to that example of pushups, starting with a max of 20 and starting sets of 10, if could take you upwards of a month of steady work to get your sub-maximal sets up to 30. (add 1 rep every 3 days). That is the type of patience this takes. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day and true fitness isn’t achieved on the scale of weeks. It takes months and years. So be patient, keep at it and take down your weaknesses one at a time.

Chris Walls is a Personal Trainer at the Crossfit Kelowna training centre.  For more information on Crossfit, please visit http://www.crossfitkelowna.com