The ultimate pre-New Year’s Eve workout

Try these workouts if you want to avoid feeling bleary and hungover tomorrow

Pulasta Dhar
Published31 Dec 2020, 10:00 AM IST
A strenuous workout, at least six hours before your first drink, is a good idea. (Photo: Istockphoto)
A strenuous workout, at least six hours before your first drink, is a good idea. (Photo: Istockphoto)

The last thing you want to feel on the 31st of December this year is guilt. Not about how you spent 2020, but about what you drink or eat on New Year ’s Eve. There are ways you can avoid feeling terrible the next morning about the number of shots you had and whether it affected your fitness. The best way to do so is to get in a good workout on the 31st morning.

Here are a few basic pointers if you plan to workout on the last day of 2020. Wait at least an hour after working out to have your first drink, but it is preferable to keep a gap of six hours between exercising and drinking, says dietician and physiologist Jim White in the article How Long Should You Wait To Drink Alcohol After A Workout? on fitness and health website Greatist.com. Also remember that the lower the alcohol content in your drink, the easier it is on your body. It would also help if you refuelled your body with good food after your workout on the day you plan to drink. Drinking immediately after a workout isn’t the greatest idea, and as the paper in the US National Library of Medicine journal, Effect of Acute Alcohol Ingestion on Resistance Exercise-Induced mTORC1 Signaling in Human Muscle says that alcohol consumption reduces the levels of human growth hormone (HGH) in your body.

Of course it’s totally okay to have a ‘31st plan’ without having to workout earlier in the day. Psychologists Roy F Baumeister and Kathleen D Vohs have an interesting take on this in their paper Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, And Motivation, in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass. They write that doing a disciplined activity like working out could lead you to being less disciplined when accepting a reward for it (in this case, a drink, or three!). It’s not the greatest example of human tendencies, but what Baumeister and Vohs are basically saying is that motivating yourself to exercise so you can drink later is a very natural impulse.

So keeping all that in mind, here are some great workouts that will stand you in good stead in case you have one drink too many on New Year’s Eve!

Death by burpees followed by a 30-minute stretch

Death by burpees is a personal favourite and a brilliant marker of one’s stamina. You’ll need a timer for this. In the first minute of the workout, you need to do one burpee. In the second minute, two. In the third, three, and so on for as long as you can keep up. Leftover time of every minute is your rest period. The workout will also teach you how to manage your time and breathing. Let’s say you take 10 seconds to do two burpees in the second minute, then the remaining 50 seconds is your rest period. As the minutes progress, the rest amount decreases and the number of burpees increases. There is no rule that you have to do the burpees together. If you’re on minute five, you can choose to use your 60 seconds as per your requirements to do the five allotted burpees. There will be a particular minute, where you will fail to finish your burpees quota or get zero rest. If, say, you fail to do 11 burpees in minute eleven, then your death by burpees score will be 10. Put yourself through this test every few weeks to see how far your fitness has come.

Also, probably try to beat my score of 17?

Follow death by burpees with this very nice stretching session.

Jordan Yeoh’s 40-minute no equipment chest, triceps, and abs workout

Yeoh’s fitness workouts are very well presented, and they’re almost always ‘do-alongs’ so that you get to suffer with him. He also stresses on the range and quality of your reps, so this one is really fun and you’ll take some lessons from it. Note that this video is for those who can do pushups easily, so if you aren’t one of them, get a couple of 1-litre water bottles and skip over to the next workout.

Heather Robertson’s 30-minute HIIT workout with light weights

Robertson’s workout is perfect for those who hate repeating exercises. This video doesn’t repeat a single set and is doable with a light pair of dumbbells or water bottles for 30 exercises in 30 minutes. Let’s go.

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First Published:31 Dec 2020, 10:00 AM IST
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