Why Winter Is the Best Time to Keep Moving

Winter has a way of making the couch feel very reasonable. But from a tissue health perspective, winter is actually one of the most useful seasons to stay consistent with exercise.

What happens to your tissues when you stop moving

Your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage are not passive structures. They are living tissues that respond to the demands you place on them.

When you load them regularly — through walking, strength training, Pilates, or any form of consistent movement — they adapt. Collagen is synthesised, tissue strength improves, and the structures that support your joints become more resilient over time.

When you stop loading them, that process slows.

The adaptation works in both directions. Load your tissues consistently, and they become more capable. Reduce their load for weeks or months, and they gradually lose some of that capacity.

Once you understand how the system works, the case for keeping moving through winter becomes a lot clearer.

How tissues actually adapt to exercise

When you exercise, you place mechanical load on your connective tissues. That load signals cells within the tissue to produce more collagen — the structural protein that gives tendons, ligaments, and cartilage their strength.

Research from Magnusson and colleagues shows that collagen synthesis begins within 72 hours of an exercise bout. But the important detail is the timeline for structural change: meaningful improvements in tendon stiffness and collagen content take around two to three months of consistent loading to develop.

Unlike muscle, which can show measurable strength gains within a few weeks, connective tissue remodels gradually. That's why regular, ongoing exercise matters more than occasional intense effort.

The problem with stopping for winter

Sometimes, activity drops over the cooler months. Then the warmer weather arrives, the motivation returns, and suddenly everyone is doing three times what they were doing in July — the coastal walks, the gardening, the first summer of pickleball.

Muscles may have lost some strength. Tendons and ligaments have had less stimulus to maintain their capacity. And the jump from a quieter winter to an active Jervis Bay summer happens over days or weeks, not the months that connective tissue needs to adapt.

This mismatch between what the body is being asked to do and what it is currently conditioned to handle is one of the primary drivers of overuse injuries — tendon pain, stress fractures, joint flare-ups, and the general collection of aches that seem to appear "out of nowhere" in warmer weather.

They appear from a gap between load and capacity.

Gradual loading is what closes that gap

The principle behind injury prevention through exercise is not complicated: increase load gradually enough that tissues have time to adapt before the next increase is applied.

When you stay active through winter — even at a lower intensity than summer — you are maintaining the tissue capacity that stops that gap from developing. You arrive at spring already conditioned. The transition to higher activity levels is easier because the baseline is higher.

Think of it as keeping your tissues ready, rather than starting from scratch.

There is no shortcut that replaces this. You cannot build three months of connective tissue adaptation in three weeks — regardless of how motivated you are when the weather warms up.

What "keeping moving" actually means

This is not an argument for training hard through winter. It's an argument for consistency over intensity.

For most people, this looks like:

• Continuing with your Pilates or strength-based exercise two to three times per week

• Maintaining your walking habits even when the weather is uninviting

• Not treating winter as a break from movement, but as a lower-key maintenance phase

The goal is to keep your tissues loaded. That steady input is what maintains their capacity and carries you into a more active season without the common spring injury pattern.

What this means in practice

If you have been dealing with recurring aches each summer — plantar fasciitis that flares when the coastal walking picks up, knee pain that returns when the garden needs attention again, shoulder niggles when you dust off the tennis racquet — winter is worth looking at as part of the picture.

The injury often feels like a summer problem. But it frequently has roots in a winter of underloading followed by a rapid increase in demand.

Staying consistent through the cooler months doesn't just keep you comfortable now. It builds the tissue resilience that protects you when activity naturally increases.

How we support this at Balanced Physiotherapy & Pilates

At Balanced Physiotherapy & Pilates in Vincentia, we work with women through every season — not just when something goes wrong. Our reformer and mat Pilates classes provide consistent, progressive loading in a controlled environment, which means your tissues are getting the stimulus they need even on the cold mornings when outdoor activity feels like a stretch.

If you've been dealing with recurring pain or want to build a more resilient base before summer arrives, a physiotherapy assessment is a good place to start. We'll look at where you are now and put a plan together that makes sense for you.

References

Kjaer, M. (2004). Role of extracellular matrix in adaptation of tendon and skeletal muscle to mechanical loading. Physiological Reviews, 84(2), 649–698. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00031.2003

Magnusson, S. P., Langberg, H., & Kjaer, M. (2010). The pathogenesis of tendinopathy: balancing the response to loading. Nature Reviews Rheumatology, 6(5), 262–268. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrrheum.2010.43

Lian, Ø., & Engebretsen, L. (2019). Functional adaptation of connective tissue by training. German Journal of Sports Medicine, 70(4). https://www.germanjournalsportsmedicine.com/archive/archive-2019/issue-4/functional-adaptation-of-connective-tissue-by-training/

Impellizzeri, F. M., et al. (2021). Editorial: Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio — Is There Scientific Evidence? Frontiers in Physiology, 12, 669687. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.669687

Zhao, Y., et al. (2025). Acute to chronic workload ratio (ACWR) for predicting sports injury risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation.https://doi.org/10.1186/s13102-025-01332-x