How to Stay Active During School Holidays Without Losing Your Mind

School holidays don’t wreck your routine. They just ask you to find it differently. Here’s what that actually looks like.

School holidays hit and suddenly everything that felt vaguely under control just disappears overnight.

There’s no real structure, no quiet windows, and somehow you’re feeding people constantly while also wondering how it’s only 10:17am.

And that plan you had – the one where you were going to stay consistent with exercise this holidays – starts to feel embarrassingly ambitious.

It’s very easy at this point to assume you just need to be more disciplined. That if you were a bit more organised, a bit more motivated, you’d keep everything ticking along. But honestly, that’s not what’s going on.

The issue isn’t discipline. It’s that you’re trying to apply a term-time rhythm to a completely different version of life. And the mums who manage to keep moving through the holidays aren’t doing more – they’re just doing things differently.

This Isn’t a Broken Routine – It’s a Different One

School holidays don’t break your routine. They replace it.

When you keep trying to force the usual structure – early runs, uninterrupted workouts, neat little time blocks – it will always feel like falling short. Because that version of your life simply isn’t available right now.

What works far better is accepting that this is a different rhythm and asking what movement looks like here, in this version of life, rather than in the ideal version.

There’s a well-established principle in behaviour change that supports this: habits are far more likely to stick when they fit the environment you’re actually in, not the one you’d prefer to be in. When there’s a mismatch between the behaviour and the context, we don’t fail because we’re incapable – we fail because the structure doesn’t support us. The solution isn’t to try harder. It’s to design better.

Plan a Little – Or the Chaos Will Plan for You

There’s a seductive idea that holidays should be spontaneous. “We’ll just see how the day goes.” Lovely in theory. Slightly less lovely when it’s day four and everyone’s climbing the walls and you haven’t moved your body once.

School holidays need a small amount of intentionality – not rigid, not overplanned, but enough to stop the week running away from you entirely.

This might look like blocking out a couple of early mornings. Booking the kids into something for a few hours so you have a clear window. Texting the school mums group at 7am: “I’m doing a walk three mornings this week if anyone wants to join.” Yes, that might feel keen. But you’ll often find others are quietly relieved that someone else suggested it first.

There’s a useful concept from psychology here called mental contrasting – the practice of not just imagining what you want to do, but actively acknowledging the obstacles alongside it. You name the chaos, you name the constraints, and then you plan with those in mind rather than pretending they won’t exist. That’s what turns intention into something that actually holds.

Make Movement Social

If there’s one shift that makes the biggest difference during school holidays, it’s this: stop trying to fit movement in around life, and start building it into life.

The easiest way to stay active right now isn’t willpower. It’s other people.

Instead of defaulting to sitting down for a catch-up, suggest a walk. Turn playdates into park meet-ups where you can move while the kids entertain each other. Pick places with space – lakes, trails, open parks – anywhere that doesn’t require sitting still for two hours. You stop trying to carve out a window and the movement happens anyway, woven into things you’d already be doing.

And yes, sometimes you’ll be the one to suggest it. But a lot of women are waiting for someone else to go first. When you do, you’re not being pushy – you’re creating an option that didn’t exist before. Finding the women who actually want to do this is something I’ve written about in more depth – it changes the whole picture.

Lower the Bar – But Keep the Standard

There’s an important distinction between lowering your expectations and lowering your standards.

During school holidays, workouts might be shorter, messier, interrupted. You might run for twenty minutes instead of sixty, walk more than you planned, squeeze something in between snack requests and “mum watch this” moments.

But that still counts. And from a behaviour change perspective, it might actually matter more than the longer, more impressive sessions. Consistently following through on something manageable – even small – reinforces the identity of someone who shows up for themselves. It keeps the thread going. And keeping the thread going is the whole game during a disrupted season.

The goal isn’t to maintain your peak training block through the summer holidays. It’s to come out the other side still in it.

Go Somewhere Different

One of the quickest ways to shift your energy during the holidays is to change your environment.

Doing the same routes, the same park, the same loop, when everything already feels slightly repetitive – it starts to feel like a chore. But go somewhere new and suddenly it feels like an outing. The movement becomes the excuse for the adventure rather than the task you’re trying to fit in.

This is backed by genuinely compelling research. A meta-analysis published in Environmental Science & Technology (Barton & Pretty, 2010), which analysed ten UK studies involving over 1,200 people, found that exercise in green environments significantly improved both self-esteem and mood – with the effects present from as little as five minutes. Your brain responds differently in natural environments. It’s not just in your head. It’s in your head differently.

I’ve felt this first-hand. I ran the London Marathon – my first one – a few years ago now. I ran it injury-free, smiling for most of it, and what I remember most clearly isn’t the finish line. It’s a conversation someone had with me on the route. Not about the kids. Not about logistics. About running. About me. About something I’d done that was entirely mine. I crossed the line feeling like I’d reclaimed something.

Then I went back in 2026. Same race, very different version of myself. I ran a significant PB and I understood, properly this time, what I was doing it for. Not to prove anything. Not to perform. But because this is part of who I am, and I know now what it costs me when I let it go.

The New Forest run I took during school holidays while deep in marathon training – one night away, different trails, proper green space instead of the same London streets – gave me a reset that two weeks of grinding the same route hadn’t managed. A change of scene, a calmer mental state. And a PB on the day, which I choose to believe was related.

Think small here: a different park, a trail instead of a pavement, a day trip where movement is built in. You don’t need to go far. You just need to go somewhere else. The Active Mum’s Guide to Seeing the World Without Giving Up Movement goes deeper on how to build this kind of thinking into travel generally.

Evenings Are an Underused Window

We assume exercise has to happen in the morning. But during school holidays, evenings are often one of the most realistic windows available.

Instead of the default “shall we grab a wine,” be the person who suggests a class, a walk, a swim. It still ticks the social box and you come away feeling like yourself rather than slightly deflated. If getting out isn’t possible, something at home – even twenty minutes, even the workout you claim to hate – is still better than nothing. Not every session has to earn its keep by being impressive.

The Self-Sabotage Nobody Talks About

This is the section worth sitting with.

When routines disappear, it’s very easy to slip into a pattern of quiet self-sabotage that doesn’t feel like self-sabotage at all. It feels like logic.

“I’ll just start again properly after the holidays.” “This week’s a write-off anyway.” “There’s no point doing it if I can’t do it properly.”

Each of those thoughts, in the moment, feels reasonable. Practical, even. And in isolation, sometimes they are – sometimes rest genuinely is the right call, and sometimes a week off is exactly what the body needs.

But there’s a version of this that isn’t rest and isn’t logic. It’s avoidance. And the difference is worth learning to recognise.

Avoidance usually arrives when things feel overwhelming or uncertain. The brain, faced with something that feels complicated or effortful, reaches for the easiest exit – and “I’ll start later” provides an immediate sense of relief. The pressure lifts. The decision is postponed. For a moment, it feels better.

The problem is what comes after. Because every time you step out of the rhythm, restarting takes more effort than maintaining it would have. The longer the gap, the heavier the threshold feels. And what started as “I’ll wait until the holidays are over” can quietly become “I’ll wait until after the summer,” and then “I’ll wait until I’ve sorted my eating first,” and then suddenly it’s been four months and you’re not quite sure how you got here.

The antidote isn’t to push through regardless – that’s the other extreme and it’s equally unhelpful. It’s to stay loosely in the game. Not perfectly. Not intensely. Just enough to keep the thread going.

A ten-minute walk counts. A twenty-minute run counts. Chasing the kids around the garden counts more than you think. The goal during a disrupted season isn’t performance. It’s continuity. And continuity – the quiet habit of showing up in some form, even imperfectly – is what means you haven’t lost it when structure returns.

This subject probably deserves its own post. The gap between knowing you want to move and actually doing it is one of the most interesting and underexplored areas in women’s health, and it goes much deeper than willpower. If this landed for you, why you can’t stick to running explores the psychology of it in more depth.

Let It Be Fun – Non-Negotiable

If it isn’t enjoyable during school holidays, it isn’t happening. So this is your permission to drop the seriousness.

Run races in the garden. Walk to places instead of driving. Make it a game. Count something. Laugh at it. Let it be messy.

Movement doesn’t need to look structured to be valuable. And some of the most chaotic, slightly ridiculous sessions end up being the ones that matter most – because they reinforce that this is something woven into your life, not just something you do when conditions are ideal.

A Final Thought

School holidays don’t take your rhythm away.

They ask you to find it in a different shape. In smaller windows. In shared moments. In the slightly imperfect version of what you’re used to.

And if you can lean into that – rather than fight it – you’ll find yourself coming out the other side not starting from scratch, but still very much in it.

Come and Share How You Make This Work

Inside the Active Happy Mum Club, school holidays are exactly the kind of thing we talk about honestly – what works, what doesn’t, and how other women are holding their rhythm together in the chaos.

Join the Active Happy Mum Club on Facebook →

Or find me on Instagram @activehappymumlife.

FAQs: Staying Active During School Holidays

Q: How do I keep exercising when I have the kids all day? The most reliable approaches are either going before they wake up – early mornings on holiday and over school holidays tend to have a different quality to them anyway – or building movement into things you’d already be doing together. Park meet-ups instead of coffee catch-ups, walking to places instead of driving, choosing destinations with space to move rather than sitting still. The goal shifts from finding a window to fitting movement into the day as it already is.

Q: Is it okay to reduce how much I exercise during school holidays? Not only okay – often sensible. School holidays are a different season of life and they ask something different from you. Maintaining the exact same training volume as term-time, on top of a completely changed daily structure, is genuinely hard. A better goal is continuity over performance: keeping the habit alive in a smaller form rather than maintaining peak output. Shorter, more frequent, more flexible tends to work far better than trying to protect rigid longer sessions.

Q: What do I do when I miss several days in a row and feel like I’ve fallen off completely? Start smaller than you think you need to. The gap between “I’ve fallen off” and “I’m back in it” is almost always shorter than it feels – but the longer you wait to bridge it, the wider it feels. A ten-minute walk, a short run with no performance expectation, something at home with the kids around. The restart doesn’t need to be impressive. It needs to happen. From there, momentum tends to build itself.

Q: How do I stop using the school holidays as an excuse to completely check out from exercise? Worth sitting with the word “excuse” – because sometimes it genuinely isn’t one. School holidays are legitimately more demanding and rest matters. But if “it’s the holidays” has become an automatic off-switch that leaves you feeling worse rather than better, that’s worth noticing. The question to ask is: am I resting because I need it, or am I avoiding because restarting feels hard? The answer usually arrives pretty quickly if you’re honest with yourself.

Q: My kids are always with me – how do I get any time alone to exercise? For many mums, completely solo exercise isn’t realistic during school holidays, and accepting that early tends to reduce a lot of frustration. The options that tend to work best: early mornings before the day starts, alternating with a partner or another mum, or involving the kids in the movement rather than trying to create space away from them. Running buggies, bike rides, family walks – they’re not the same as a solo run, but they keep the habit alive in a way that matters. (A full post on running with a buggy is coming – watch this space.)

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