3 Hacks to Preserve Your Performance This Holiday Season

November 17, 2025By Kirsten Milic

You’ve made the gains this year—and you deserve to enjoy the holidays. The cookies, the turkey dinner, the rum and eggnog... all very deserved.

However, you’ve worked too hard to let your progress fade after two weeks of inactivity. The good news? Preserving your strength through the holidays doesn’t mean skipping the festivities—it just takes a few smart, deliberate choices.

With a bit of movement, mindful eating, and some added muscle protection, you can hit January ready to keep building, not start over.

What you’ll learn in this article:

How to train for strength and power at home (even without weights)
How to navigate holiday eating without guilt
How HMB can help protect muscle and performance during downtime

1. Train Power, Speed, and Tempo From Home

Before you freak out that you’re not going to be able to work on your strength because all you have are a couple of light dumbbells at home (or maybe no weights at all), we have two quick tips for improving strength and power without heavy equipment.

Add Tempo Training. Tempo work is a simple way to build strength without taxing your central nervous system the way heavy loads do. Slowing down your lifts increases time under tension, forces your muscles to work harder, helps preserve strength, and sharpens movement control and stability. A few suggestions to get you started:

Goblet squats: Fill up a milk jug—or pick up the family dog—as a weight. Take 3 seconds to descend, 3 seconds to hold at the bottom, then explode up.
Dumbbell or floor press: Use light dumbbells or heavy books. Lie on the floor and slowly lower for 3 seconds, hover above your chest for 3 seconds, then press.
Other moves: Deadlifts, split squats, shoulder press, lunges, and step-ups all work great with tempo training. It taxes your body in a new way while preserving (and even building) strength.

Add Plyometrics. Plyometrics are explosive movements performed over short intervals—think vertical jumps. They build speed and power, and the best part is you can do them using just your bodyweight. Try adding these:

Single-leg bounding: Great for building power and balance, which translates back to movements like cleans and snatches. Find a track, driveway, or open hallway. Bound forward on one leg, aiming for height and distance with minimal ground contact time. Try five bounds per leg. Practice it enough and you’ll feel like an agile rabbit bounding through a forest.
Plyo Push-Ups: Tired of regular push-ups?

Clapping push-ups: Push explosively off the ground and clap mid-air.
Target push-ups: Place two plates, books, or medicine balls beside your hands and push up onto them.

Medicine ball slam to box jump-overs: Start with a simple slam and jump-over. Use any heavy ball or sandbag, and jump over anything stable if you don’t have a box. Keep reps low and focus on quality.

Female athlete doing box jumps in a crossfit gym

2. Nutrition: Enjoy the Holidays Without Losing Control

Turkey dinner. Shortbread cookies. Mulled wine. These things are going to happen—and you shouldn’t feel guilt or shame about any of it. You’ve planned this, and we fully support it.

That said, there are plenty of other meals where you can stay on track. A few smart choices go a long way in preserving muscle and energy.

Tip 1: Focus on High-Satiety Foods

So you’re going to be eating some high calorie foods, and a great way to counter this the rest of the time is to select foods that are high on the satiety index, meaning they’ll help you feel full and full or energy longer, and hopefully stop you from eating even more of the bad stuff than you intend to.

Protein helps maintain muscle and reduces cravings. Stick with your usual protein intake—or slightly increase it if you know you’ll be upping carbs later in the day.
Clean sources like lean meats, eggs, cottage cheese, and protein powder are good options.
If you use a protein powder, stick with it. If not, try our Egg White Protein Isolate—a clean, minimally processed, natural-tasting source that’s as close to real food as you can get.

Tip 2: Don’t Forget Fibre

Fibre makes you feel full, so focus on eating high fibre foods during your meals. Focus on high-fibre foods like:

Broccoli, chard, collard greens
Artichokes, avocados, apples, berries
Nuts and seeds

Eat your lean protein and vegetables at dinner, so you’ll feel less hungry for cookies and pie and ice cream for dessert.

3. Support Recovery and Muscle Maintenance with HMB

Even with the best intentions, you’ll probably move less over the holidays—and that’s okay. You can still protect your muscle and strength by supporting your body’s repair systems.

What is HMB?

HMB (beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate) is a metabolite of the amino acid leucine. It helps:

Slow muscle protein breakdown
Speed up protein synthesis
Preserve muscle cell structure

In practical terms: HMB reduces muscle loss when you’re training less and enhances recovery when you ramp back up—ideal for times when you’re spending more time with family than in the gym.

HMB in Food

Our bodies can make some HMB in the liver and muscles (where it’s converted into HMG-CoA, important for cell membrane repair), but not enough to rely on.

Foods containing small amounts of HMB include:

Grapefruit
Catfish
Alfalfa
Asparagus
Avocados
Cauliflower
Catfish

These help—but if you’re looking for a noticeable effect, supplementation is key.

What is HMB?

HMB Supplementation

HMB helps you preserve the muscle you already have. If you’re not lifting as hard as usual for a week or two over the holidays, HMB can help ensure you don’t lose strength. What better Christmas present, right?

And it’s well backed by science: other than creatine, HMB is one of the most thoroughly researched supplements available. A 2013 University of Arkansas study found that taking HMB led to significantly less muscle loss after just 10 days of bed rest.

Looking for some added HMB? Blonyx HMB Sport and HMB+ Creatine are both designed to help you stay strong, even when you’re not training as hard.

Blonyx HMB+ Creatine on a Weight Plate with A Scoop of Creatine Powder

Key Takeaways

You don’t have to choose between enjoying the holidays and staying fit.
A few tempo workouts, smarter food choices, and the right recovery support will help you maintain your performance.
Have your turkey, your eggnog, and your training progress too.

Stay strong. Enjoy the season. See you in January, ready to hit the ground running.

If you learned something new from this article and are curious to know more, head to the Blonyx Blog our growing list of weekly research summaries where we help you further improve your athletic performance by keeping you up to date on the latest findings from the world of sports nutrition.

— Train hard!