In his book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear reminds us that:
“Winners and losers have the same goals.”
The difference between them is not the goal, he says. Instead, he suggests that only when the winners “implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome,” and that their inner champion emerged. This is a quote I use often with my athletes and clients, as a reminder that by continuing to do the same thing over and over again, we often are overlooking our gateway to better performance; those small improvements all around us that invite greatness. Taking better care of our bodies and beings through the winter is one such invitation.
When it comes to pushing further, reaching higher, and finding new peaks in our performance, the truth is that we’ll miss the mark if we don’t honor the natural rhythms around and within us. And that means aligning with the seasons. Not just our training seasons, or the calendars associated with them but the seasons of NATURE. Winter is the season we all associate with factors that have the potential to sabotage our biggest goals, but in fact this season offers up some of the greatest opportunities to truly harness new habits and achieve. Below are the 5 most common mistakes athletes and new clients are making when they come to me, and a few tips for how to turn them around!
What about a refreshing cold smoothie feels suitable on a cold winter’s day? I’ll never know, and the body will never know either. Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies are very hard at work trying to keep digestion and normal biological function high, restoring and rebuilding after a hard summer, and regenerating for the season ahead. And this is WITHOUT the added stress of training or racing. The best thing we can do to help this process is STAY WARM. Whenever we eat cold foods, our bodies have to work doubly hard to raise the temperature of any substance to 98.6°F…that’s energy that we could be using to recover, train or race. When we fail to keep the body warm in the winter, Kapha – the dosha in the body responsible for protecting the system, starts building a barrier layer of moisture to protect our organs and continue biological functioning.
If we eat cold foods through the winter, the body over produces Kapha in the form of mucus, congestion, and excessive water retention. When spring starts to melt, this cold, Kapha body will fail to melt off this extra moisture which will present as challenging weight gain, sluggishness, congestion, inflammation and illness (most often a cold or flu,) just as spring is springing.
Avoid all of this entirely by eating warm, drinking warm, keeping extremities warm, and saving the smoothies (and the salads!) for summertime.
Nature has a miraculous way of providing exactly the kind of nourishment we need for every season. But, this is often lost in the glitz, glam, and packaging of the modern supermarket, where we can get fresh berries in any season and superfood ingredients flown in from all over the world. Unfortunately, just because it’s available doesn’t mean that your body finds it valuable. Our foods have nutritional value yes, this comes in the form of macronutrients and micronutrients. But our foods also have energetic and intrinsic values, that are often far more important than the macros and micros. In the summer, we need foods that energetically cool and cleanse us, while in the winter, our bodies want and need densely nutritious foods that will help us to use this season to rebuild and regenerate for an explosive spring. This stockpile of nutrition doesn’t come from salads, but from ingredients like roots, proteins, fats and complex carbohydrates — all foods that are prevalent and appropriate for the season.
When we ignore this biological need and keep right on eating the way we do all summer, we miss this opportunity to stockpile nutrients in the cells (not in fat, in strong cells), lose the window to deeply nourish, and end up sacrificing performance. Through the winter, eat foods that are growing in winter where you live or that were available for storage in late fall; root vegetables, hearty cooked greens, healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, and plant and animal proteins.
Leave the far-flung fruits, tender greens, bright-colored vegetables, tender greens and light meals for seasons when these foods are sprouting in the fields and your performance is blooming.
If we take a look outside, we see that the trees, flowers, bunnies, and even birds are taking a rest. Snow (hopefully) blankets the landscape; this moisture will be soaked up by plants as it melts, rejuvenating them and allowing them to absorb enough nutrients so that they can sprout brilliantly come to the spring thaw. Regardless of whether we recognize it or not, our bodies are doing something similar; striving to soak up as much nourishment and rest as possible so we can burst forward into spring and summer, and that includes our athletic prowess.
By never taking a pause in our training calendar, and specifically not bumping rest and rebalancing up in our list of priorities, we miss a massive opportunity to align with the natural rhythm of hibernation, which inevitably leads to a period of emotional, physical, and mental fatigue surrounding our sport and our goals in the middle of our summer season. We end up overtrained, under-nourished, over-extended, and smoked in the part of our season that matters most.
If you choose to stick to your training calendar, reduce the intensity with which you attack it. Instead of aiming to get after training sessions that are equally as long as those that you tackle in the summer, cut them into halves or thirds and use the remaining time to stretch, practice breathwork or another low-intensity, a high-value activity that builds resistance and mental fortitude, not just physical prowess. Most of all, if you find yourself craving a day, or a week away from regimen honor your intuition!
Newsflash: it’s completely normal to gain 3-5 pounds in the winter, and it has nothing to do with what you’re eating, or if you’re doing a “good job” of training. It has everything to do with your body’s biological process for bolstering against the cold. Winter is the season of Vata – the season of dry, light, cool, rough, subtle, and mobile. As such, our bodies will increase in the opposite qualities to balance, specifically by generating and hanging onto moisture to keep the body and its vital organs warm. Effectively, the body creates and hangs onto a layer of suppleness (typically moisture, not fat) that acts as a barrier around the parts of the body doing the big work through this brutal season, and this moisture barrier shows up on the scale.
This barrier may be increasingly prominent if you’re an athlete training and moving in the cold and not consuming ample calories, or consuming cold foods that are negatively impacting your internal body temperature. But, when we see this number crawl up even slightly, we presume that it’s our fitness slipping away…so we train harder, move more, eat less, and create a vicious cycle.
Eat seasonally, in ways that are appropriate for your dosha. Consume smaller, nutritionally dense meals rather than eating “less.” And recognize that a small amount of extra weight gained is a sign that you’re fueling your body appropriately for the season, and that your system is functioning properly, in balance with natural rhythms around you rather than struggling to keep up. If you’re curious about what fueling and rest should look like for your unique constitution, let’s work together.
Winter is an opportunity to physically reset, but also to embrace new activities and challenges that expand – rather than reduce – our performance as athletes. Whether you shift focus to resistance training and strength, bolstering your cardiovascular capacity with shorter, high-intensity workouts or embracing fresh challenges in winter sports, there are myriad ways to not only keep fitness, but make our fitness more versatile, and all of them create an opportunity to take time away from the sport we do most.
Resigning yourself to the same activities all year round can be rewarding, but it can also be mentally exhausting and physically limiting.
Taking time away to try new things, exercise new muscles, and expand fitness horizons not only makes for a more resilient athleticism, and rests the mind from the constant pursuit of excellence, but also brings a fresh perspective to the sports we love and the goals we aim for, meaning we get to stay “in it,” longer and stronger.
Winter is an opportunity to physically reset, but also to embrace new activities and challenges that expand – rather than reduce – our performance as athletes. Whether you shift focus to resistance training and strength, bolstering your cardiovascular capacity with shorter, high-intensity workouts or embracing fresh challenges in winter sports, there are myriad ways to not only keep fitness, but make our fitness more versatile, and all of them create an opportunity to take time away from the sport we do most.
Resigning yourself to the same activities all year round can be rewarding, but it can also be mentally exhausting and physically limiting.
Taking time away to try new things, exercise new muscles, and expand fitness horizons not only makes for a more resilient athleticism, and rests the mind from the constant pursuit of excellence, but also brings a fresh perspective to the sports we love and the goals we aim for, meaning we get to stay “in it,” longer and stronger.