Santa Claus, aka Jason Crow from the Better Body Group, provides his top tips on how to super charge your Christmas training.
Christmas is my favourite time of year for training and getting great results. You get time off to train and there is an abundance of great energy and muscle building foods readily available. Here’s my tips on how to super charge your Christmas training.
Carb up: With the quantity of food around, don’t be afraid to carb up, always making sure that your muscle glycogen is totally replenished and ready for a great workout. Remember you only store a maximum of between 500g and 900 g of carbohydrates in your body at any time depending on your body size.
Double up on veg: For those of you looking to maintain your weight and not increase your body fat or if you’re just a big eater like me, double up on the normal amount of veg that you would eat in a meal, especially when it’s there readily available. This is a great way to increase your nutrient density, reduce muscular inflammation and speed up recovery.
Train early: If you have a day when you know you’ve got a lot of festivities on, get to the gym early or do your cardio at home in a fasted state as soon as you wake up. Your increase in food over the festive period will ensure that you’ve got more than enough stored energy to fuel you through any early morning session.
Build festive strength and size: I turn the festive period into an opportunity to put some good strength and size on. Working on the basis that I will have more than enough good calories to get me through an intense workout and provide a quick recovery afterwards. Splitting my week between strength and volume based hypertrophy training (email me at enquiries@betterbodygroup.co.uk to find out how to do this).
Miss a meal if needed: If you are left with no real choice of food at a festive event and you know a lot of alcohol will be involved you can always drop a meal in the early part of the day, this has the added benefit of increasing your fasting period and leaving you room for the spare dirty calories at the end of the day.
Manage your macros: Keep your macros in mind when choosing your festive foods at events whether it be per meal or per day. Try to make sure that you get a steady amount of clean protein in with each meal as the body has trouble absorbing more than 40 grams of protein per meal.
Train before you go out: If you really want to make the most of your calories when you go out to events or sit down for large meals, train hard before you go out. You have a three hour absorption window after training when your body loves to take in and absorb food.
Don’t go out hungry or thirsty: Attending a Christmas function hungry or thirsty leaves you open to overheating the high fat, salt and sugar laden party food. If you know there’s going to be no decent food on hand and excessive amount of alcohol make sure you eat good nutrient dense and protein heavy meal before you go out and hydrate yourself through out the day.
Use clean proteins to keep you away from ultra processed foods: When everyone else is going for the sausage rolls and chicken twislers aim for the prawns, turkey, and lean cut of meat that people seem to ignore.
After all this is said and done, make sure you have a fantastic Christmas and feel free to use my suggestions as a springboard for some fantastic festive muscular, fitness and fat burn improvements. Santa.
