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Health & Fitness

What To Do When It Snows

Shoveling might be a harder workout than anything else you do in or out of the gym all year.

Shoveling might be a harder workout than anything else you do in or out of the gym all year.  Especially when you’re shoveling about a foot or more of snow like we received over the past weekend.  Where I am, we got over 14 inches of snow.  Unless your back hurts because you were shoveling using your back instead of using your legs, snow shouldn’t stop you from doing a real workout.  Blaming the snow on missing a workout falls in the same category as saying you don’t have enough time or energy to work out, you can always figure out a way.  Figuring out two solutions to every problem you face should be your rule when it comes to eating healthy and working out. 

If you’re bummed you can’t go to the gym in the morning because it’s either closed or you have no way out because the backroads you live on aren’t plowed yet, there are many home workout solutions to this problem.  If you have one kettlebell, a pair of dumbbells, or nothing but your own body weight, you have enough equipment to get in a calorie burn.

This was my “no gym” workout on Saturday morning post shoveling.  I used a 52lb kettlebell and a pair of 30lb dumbbells. 

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I started with about 10 minutes of ab work.  Plank Rollouts, Bicycle Crunches, Spider Planks, Side Planks, Flutter Kicks, and Ball Curls were the exercises.  Then I moved on to the circuit below:

10 Kettlebell Swings

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10 Kettlebell Goblet Squats

10 Kettlebell High Pulls

10 Dumbbell Push Press

10 Bodyweight Split Squats

10 Bodyweight Squat Jumps

I took a one minute break and repeated this 5x.  After the 5th time around, I repeated some of the ab circuit from when I started and then took a 3 minute break (5 minutes of break total including the ab work) and repeated the circuit another 5 times.  I was drenched before I even began the second circuit of the exercises.  If you had no equipment at all, I would have done:

60 Jumping Jacks: Done as fast as possible, but make sure you do full jumping

jacks. Arms all the way extended at the top.

20 Pushups: 

10 Split Squats 

30secs Spiderman Plank 

30-60secs Wall Squat (aka wall sit.

10 Burpees

30secs High Knees

You might be saying that workout looks too easy, or maybe you’re saying it looks too hard.  Whichever way you feel about it you can always change the variables (meaning the repetitions and amount of time of each exercises).  Maybe those are numbers you want to try and work up to one day or maybe you’d consider that you’re warm-up.  Whatever your fitness level you can always make it challenging for you. 

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