As the temperature drops and the snow comes down, staying healthy becomes harder during the winter. However, there are more ways than ever to stay in shape that are easy to find and usually cost next to nothing.

“Exercising indoors seems to cause a problem for some people,” aerobics teacher Amy Luna said. “They think they need to have a membership to an expensive gym, but that’s not necessarily the case. You can exercise in your home, and you can exercise in your home without weights. You can go to Walmart and purchase DVD’s for less than ten dollars that can point you in the right direction. Youtube is a great source of an endless supply of workouts, and Pinterest has a lot of workout ideas. You can work out without weights, just using your own body weight in your own living room if you really want to.”

These low cost and creative solutions have been able to help our school’s classes.

“We’ve been doing a lot of Pinterest workouts in aerobics,” Luna said. “They’ve been proving to be pretty challenging. [We have] lots of sore girls walking around.”

One of the hardest parts of working out seems to be getting started. However, the beginning of the year is the perfect time to start as it instills habits to continue you through the rest of the year.

“Typically people start working out in the winter when New Years’ resolutions are a kickstarter,” Luna said. “Then swimsuit season is coming up and that seems to be a motivator for people, and then as the summer progresses and it gets really hot, people start dialing it back a little bit.”

As important as it is to work out, sometimes health problems may be solved in simpler ways. People who seem to be very in shape may not actually be healthy. There are some questions to ask yourself to determine if you are actually healthy.

“How often are they washing their hands,” Luna said, “are they drinking plenty of water, are they eating healthy, are they exercising even thought it is cold outside? Get some sleep. Kids don’t sleep enough. Get some sleep, eat right, don’t just sit on the couch all day and play video games. If they’re moving they’re going to feel better. They’re going to sleep better, and things like eating healthy can help with that too.”

Simply starting to workout can affect other aspects of health and influence similar healthy habits.

“I think if you start working out you’re going to start becoming a lot healthier without a lot of effort put in and it will affect other categories,” Luna said. “Your heart rate gets better, you sleep better at night and more sleep helps with the prevention of getting sick also. It seems like instantly once people start working out, they watch what they eat. Put down the soda pop, pick up a water bottle and that seems to get things started. Working out seems to be the biggest hurdle, but if you can get that started then the rest kind of falls into place.