It's tempting to just hibernate indoors during the cold-weather months with your feet up by a warm fire. Tempting, but not healthful. For even though bears hibernate, there are good reasons for humans to leave their dens.

The main reasons to stay in shape in the winter are to keep your weight down, your mental health up, and maintain your cardiac fitness. It's been well demonstrated that the health benefits of exercise are directly related to how much you do.

Let's start with cardiac fitness. Study after study shows that regular exercise cuts the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, colon cancer, and high blood pressure. To maximize these health benefits, you have to exercise year-round. But exercising in the winter requires caution. More heart attacks occur in the cold months compared to the summer. If you are getting your exercise out in the cold, go a little slower and keep up the hydration. If you start to sweat profusely, slow down. If you get lightheaded, stop immediately.

Heart attacks are particularly common in out-of-shape men and women who lumber out of their winter habitats and attempt to shovel what amounts to hundreds of pounds of snow. In the cold weather, the arteries in the heart constrict and blood pressure rises, which can touch off a heart attack, especially in the elderly and those with heart disease.

Most people know there's a connection between fitness and physical health. But fitness is also critical to emotional health. Evidence shows that exercise reduces anxiety and depression, both of which are more problematic as the crush of holiday merrymaking collides with the gloom of winter.

Finally, if you can't think of a better reason to stay in shape during the winter, think of spring.

The big problem is that most cardiac events and musculoskeletal problems all begin when people try to get back in shape, particularly if they try to do it too fast.

Muscle strains, joint sprains, tendinitis and stress fractures are common injuries for people who try to pick up where they left off after a winter with no exercise. So to head off springtime injuries, keep on your toes this winter.

Learn more about why you should stay active and ways to incorporate exercise into your winter lifestyle. For details, click on one of the links below:

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