How Long Before Your Wedding Should You Start Working Out?
It is only normal to want to look great on your wedding day. Working out can help but how long before the big event should you start with it?
Preferably, you want to start a wedding fitness routine at least 6 months before the big day. This helps you avoid crash diets, allows you to adjust your workouts and dress, and helps you avoid injuries.
As Stephanie mentions “the earlier the better”. Even if you could make it in time otherwise, having better physical health offers a variety of benefits including stress reduction.
There is also still hope if you don’t have this much time left. Stephanie mentions that she has had brides that saw nice amounts of progress in 1 to 3 months too.
However, if you are at this point and not that experienced with exercise, it can be a good idea to get a wedding workout plan from someone like Stephanie who knows what she is doing to avoid mistakes.
Preparing your body for your wedding involves more than exercise
Something important to keep in mind is that preparing your body for a wedding is typically not only done by working out more often and intensely.
Other lifestyle habits like what you eat are extremely important too.
To put this into perspective, something like 100 jumping jacks (2.5 minutes of high-intensity exercise) will roughly burn around 20 to 34 calories.
A thousand repetitions (25 minutes) more something like 197 to 339 calories.
On the other hand, a 67-gram plain muffin you can eat in 5 minutes contains around 167 calories (1).
And even if you have a decent diet that keeps you at more or less the same weight, it will take a lot of jumping jacks, other cardio exercises, and/or weight lifting to lose a pound of body fat (around 3500 calories) and more.
Fat loss is not the only goal but it does help you make your toned muscles more visible, helps you be more cheerful, and makes you feel better.
Ideal time to start working out before your wedding
After asking Stephanie who is more experienced in this specific area than me, she said “I always say the earlier the better, 6 months or more is ideal”.
I definitely have the same impression from the physical health transformations I have seen.
Only having a short time to get in shape before your wedding may be motivating to really go at it with your workouts but it is also not ideal in many ways.
By starting with your bridal workout packages and plans in time you get some of the following benefits.
Helps you avoid fad and crash diets
With only a short amount of time before the wedding, it can be tempting and required to turn to fad and crash diets.
These ways of eating where you heavily restrict calories, certain foods, or certain food groups can offer some short term weight loss results but they are also often unhealthy and unsustainable.
Additionally, even if you manage to be consistent with restrictive diets, it could be hard to be cheerful on your wedding day after a week or month of eating 500 calories a day.
Gives you time to adjust
Even with a good workout plan, there is often some amount of trying out, waiting for results, and adjusting your approach based on the results.
By starting this improvement process early, you have enough time to figure out a good wedding workout plan with the right weights, repetitions, and exercises for you personally.
Additionally, as the results of your exercise habits come in, you may need to adjust your wedding dress (or suit for men).
Since you will likely have more than enough going on the weeks before the big event, the sooner you can get to your wedding body the better.
Helps you avoid injuries
If you only start exercising a few weeks before your wedding, you could look at the calorie-burning estimations and conclude that you need intense hour-long workouts to get to your goals.
However, going straight from 0 to long workouts can be mentally overwhelming and can potentially cause injuries.
Injuries do not only reduce the number of workouts you can do before the event. You likely don’t want to be limping around on your big day either.
For all of these reasons, it is generally smart to start working out 6 months or more before your wedding.
1 to 3 months could still work
Stephanie also mentions that brides to brides to be can also see results when starting 1 to 3 months before the big day.
She has had cases where even in only a month brides were able to see a nice amount of progress.
Stephanie emphasizes it of course won’t be anything as drastic as with 3 months, 6 months, or longer amounts of preparation time.
Something to note is that if you are new to working out, 30 days is typically not enough to start experimenting and figuring out for yourself what good exercise routines are.
If you are at this point in your preparation process, you really want a good wedding workout plan from someone who knows what she/he is doing to avoid mistakes.
Additionally, you definitely don’t want to ignore the things you eat in a situation like that. It is possible to have a great workout plan and gain weight if your other lifestyle habits are not good enough.That being said, brides and grooms who are not yet this close to the wedding again want to keep in mind that the sooner they start, the better. Even if it is just because of all the other benefits you get from it.
Author’s biography:
Matt Claes is the head coach and founder of Weight Loss Made Practical – A personal coaching company that helps busy people lose weight and keep it off.
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