Good News: “It’s Too Cold” is a Legitimate Excuse Not To Exercise

Some scientists who read my text messages recently have looked into the reason that Seamless and Netflix seem like a hot Friday night once the temperature drops. A new study highlighted in The Atlantic shows that people perceive inclement weather as a barrier to physical activity, so we tend to move less when it’s too hot or too cold.The study put an activity tracker on hundreds of thousands of users’ wrists for a year and used weather data to correlate subjects’ movement with local weather conditions. Based on how much users moved in different climes, researchers learned the ideal temperature for walking around is between the low 60s and high 70s.  Anything lower than that, and I’ll be inside watching “Golden Girls.”  So the good news is you’re not alone in making excuses when it’s too hot or too cold to work out. But the bad news is that our health can be negatively affected by staying indoors (even with good reason).