Staying active with autum: easy ways to dive back in

With the festive period now well and truly over, we find ourselves in something of a limbo and staying active is perhaps not number one on our priority list.

Gone are the days of foodie indulgence and leisure time galore – at least for another 11 months – but there’s also a great deal to be hopeful about. This is after all a fresh start and, even if you’ve missed the boat on the ‘new year, new me’ craze, it’s not too late to make meaningful progress towards a better way of life.

Now, that does come with a caveat of course and finding the motivation to start and keep going. What’s more, in the thick of the bleak midwinter months, it can be that much harder to find the motivation to get out and make the changes you want to make.

With fleeting daylight and freezing temperatures, waiting out the winter inside can make it easy for loneliness to start creeping back into our lives. In fact, according to a OnePoll survey, around 35% of people are less likely to socialise in the winter than they are in the spring or summer. While this is a completely normal and understandable response – I’m certainly guilty of it sometimes – it isn’t an issue that we can’t rectify.

So, whether you’re starting your new years’ lifestyle journey slightly later, or still going strong with your resolutions, here are just a few ways that you can make the most of life in through the colder months without losing sight of the lifestyle you want!

Before anything else though, it bears mentioning that shifting from the leisure and indulgence of our festive mindsets back into everyday life can be a shock to the system and can throw our existing routines out of joint – I’m sure we can all appreciate that! This doesn’t mean, however, that you’re alone in your journey and that’s where autum comes in.

autum is a helping hand for tracking your lifestyle and for making a positive change towards a healthier, more active one. For us, understanding that everyone’s journey will be different – and that the key to making real progress is to build up gradually – is at the heart of what we do. That’s why with autum, we offer a tailored lifestyle-tracking experience; simply tell us your end goals and how you feel each day, and the app will provide a unique set of suggestions which fit your personal profile.

Staying active mentally and physically

In a physical sense, keeping active throughout the colder days can be a tough sell, but exercise takes on an even greater importance in the winter. As I’m sure we’re all well aware, the plummeting winter temperatures can lead to a number of health issues. From worsening joint pain to weakening our immune systems, it’s more important to put the extra effort into our physical and mental health now than any other time of year.

Now, we could talk all day about how getting out and about can benefit our mental health – but physical exercise can benefit your health in a whole range of other ways. To name only a few, regular exercise is believed to promote better sleeping patterns, reduces inflammation and boost cell immunity which all have knock on effects on how well our immune systems can fend off seasonal bugs.

With autum, tracking your fitness journey is easy; all you need to do is pick from a list of activities, suggested with your personal fitness levels in mind, and the app will do the rest. Is the colder weather threatening to put a dampener on your options outdoors?

Not to worry; autum recognises that not every day will be blessed with blue skies and will suggest a broad range of classes at your nearest leisure centre or a number of alternative home workouts which will help keep you fit and firing.

Get out and about this winter!

Now, I’m sure we can all agree that keeping up with a fitness routine in those first few months can become a bit of a chore – somehow especially so when it’s part of a new years’ resolution!

With the pressures of modern society demanding more and more of our attention, that one extra thing to keep track of can feel like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Now, that’s only natural, but that’s just another way that autum can help.

Using its data tracking system, our app takes your mood, fitness levels and progress into account to produce an easy-to-follow daily timetable based on the choices you make from a uniquely curated list of suggested activities. Not only does it take the stresses of scheduling out of the equation, autum acts as your in-pocket partner along your journey and will regularly check in with you to make sure you’re happy living life the way you want to!

Finally, a lot of fitness apps can become a bit of a paperchase with information locked behind doors or sprawled out across different sections. Not autum: our app allows you to check your progress, change your personal data and your activity history at the touch of a button – all in one place, and all above board!

So, while the gloomy winter’s days lurch onward, it’s not quite the end-of-the-world that some of us – mostly me – might think it is. Whether it’s a helping hand along your fitness journey that you’re after, or a little more adventure in your daily life, allow autum to help you boost your winter today by staying active!

To help us make Britain one million biological years younger take our autum Lifescore calculator to determine your biological age and use our autum app on Android or IOS to help improve your biological age today!

If you enjoyed Staying active with autum: easy ways to dive back into the New Year, you’ll find more lots more tips for ageing well on our blog.