Cold weather, exercise mix with right gear

It's snowy. It's cold. It's windy. Who wants to exercise outside in the winter?

But nasty weather doesn't mean you have to head to the gym and fight the hordes waiting for the next available treadmill. As one environmental physiologist once said, "Man in the cold is not necessarily a cold man." In other words: Suck it up, cupcake, and get out the door.

With proper preparation, clothing, and common sense, there's really no place on Earth where it's so cold that you absolutely must forsake your outdoor exercise routine.

"If you have the right gear, you can do anything you want in the cold," says John Castellani, a research physiologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine and an expert on cold injuries and exercise.

The solution is to bundle up. But do it the right way.

"The layer of clothing closest to your skin shouldn't be tight and should be made of one of those new fibers that conducts moisture away from the skin," like polypropylene, says Delia Roberts, a sports medicine researcher at Selkirk College in Castlegar, British Columbia. (She knows whereof she speaks: She was calling from the remote hills of British Columbia, where she was teaching fitness and injury prevention to heli-skiing guides. The temperature was minus 22 degrees.)

The second, or middle, layer of clothing acts as insulation; wool and synthetics are both good. Finally, the outer layer should be wind- or waterproofed, to keep out the elements. Be sure to cover your hands, if needed (Roberts likes thin, silver-thread gloves under windproof mittens), and also your head.

While it's a myth that you lose 60 percent of your body's heat through your head, it's often the only area left exposed, says Castellani, so you will get cold if you don't cover up.

When you start out, you should be slightly cool, so that you won't get sweaty and overheated once you get going. If it's cold enough, you'll probably notice that your performance will suffer; research has shown that the ideal temperature for running is about 51 or 52 degrees, says Castellani. (It's unclear exactly why.) It's also unclear whether exercising in cold conditions makes people any more vulnerable to sports injuries like muscle pulls or sprains, he says.

One caution for people with heart problems: The American College of Sports Medicine says that bodily cooling can lower the threshold for the onset of angina, so check with your doctor before you start a cold-weather workout routine.

You're more likely to get chilled when you stop working out, particularly if you've been sweating and you're wet, says Roberts. So get inside quickly, or at least have some dry clothes handy to change into. And take heart in the fact that you'll acclimate a bit to the cold as the winter goes on.