7 Awesome Winter Hobbies for Men

Staying inside the comfort of your home watching your favorite television series or just lazing on the couch can be more appealing to many during winter. It is cold outside, and you want to stay cozy inside the warmth of your blankets. It can be challenging for most physically active men, too!

This is where having a hobby comes into play. Instead of just wasting time watching T.V or using your smartphones, you can spend your time doing something productive. This is called a hobby.

A 2016 Japanese study of older people found that taking partaking in hobbies positively impacted longevity and healthy life expectance. Source. It is also a well-known fact, and as well as research has shown that hobbies help relieve stress as well.

As studies have shown, around 70% of men’s health issues come with poor lifestyle choices. Keeping this in mind, hobbies might help you improve your lifestyle, and along with it, it can also bring positive health benefits both mentally and physically.

Given below are some of the indoor and outdoor winter hobbies for men that will get you up and transforming yourself into the self-reliant and active men that you are.

  1. Working out. Let’s burn it out!!

A great winter hobby for the most active of men would be working out. Working out can be one of the most tiring, but at the same time, it can also be one of the most rewarding and enjoyable kinds of a hobby.  That is also one of the reasons why it can be one of the most fun but physically and mentally demanding winter hobbies for guys.

Why tiring? Because you must get your body moving to stay fit and active. As hard as that might sound, you need not spend hours on end in the gym or at home working out but instead just spending 20-30 minutes daily or alternatively will keep you fit and healthy.

Why rewarding? Because if you do the sets and the repetitions well, then the chances are that you will see results early on if you stick to the schedule well.

The results may vary from person to person and depends on the body type. For the average man, it takes around 2-3 weeks that you start noticing results. Your posture starts improving, and you feel lighter with more muscle tone.

Working out has a lot of significant benefits for men as well. Some of which are:

• It improves testosterone levels in men as they age.
• It makes your bones stronger.
• It lowers the risk of high blood pressure.
• It lowers the risk of diabetes.
• It makes for healthier blood vessels.
• It reduces depression and anxiety.
• It also lowers cholesterol.

If you have just started working out, whether at home or at the gym, here are some quick tips to help you on your journey.

•It is vital to start slow and slowly move up in the intensity of your training. People tend to start highly active and robust at the end but tend to lose focus and determination after few weeks of working out. They may lead you to lose interest in working out and eventually getting burned out as you are not enjoying the process.

So, start slow and slow and gradually work your way up in sets or reps or even weights depending on the type of workout you are doing.

•Always be consistent. Do not do it according to your moods. Sure, you must enjoy the process as well, but at the same, you cannot just go off for like weeks and do the next day and then skip again. The great thing about workouts is that you can always adjust the timings and the intervals according to what’s best fit for your schedule. Whether that is doing on alternate days or doing only three times a week, the important thing is that you need to be consistent.

•Last but not least, you need to set goals. This will help you keep motivated in the long run but also have a clear-cut objective.

 So, if you are into fitness or want to be fit and active, then give working out a try. It can also be one of the best winter hobbies for men. 

2. Cooking. Bring that inner culinary skills to life!

This is another excellent winter hobby for the family man. If you are more into food and getting those tasty new ideas to show up on your plate or want to have some great family time in the kitchen, then cooking makes for one of the best hobbies to do in winter.

 Ever wanted to make that one tasty dish that you ate that one time at that restaurant? Well, winter might be that break you have been looking for to test your cooking skills. During winters, as most of us are shut inside the comforts of our homes. What other better way to bring your chef skills to light than during this time?

Just like how it is in working out, in cooking, you can see and track your progress as well, which is extremely rewarding and satisfactory to experience.

Cooking can also simply be an enjoyable thing to do. You can choose to do it alone, or best do it with family or friends. You will spend hours of your time cooking in the kitchen while having fun talking with family and friends. All in all, cooking mixed with chit chat and fun time in the kitchen can never go wrong.

Besides the hours of a fun time you will be having in the kitchen alone or with family and friends, and your cooking skills are entirely transferable as well. By transferable, it can help you develop other skills that would help other areas of life. The hand skills you develop with cooking can be carried along in a field such as dentistry.

Cooking also requires you to have a lot of patience as well. So, when learning cooking, you also learn to have patience. All these traits and benefits combined will turn you into a well-rounded person capable person.

So, all these reasons combined, cooking proves to be one of the most rewarding and best winter hobbies for men.

3. Wood Cutting.

Yes, you read it correctly, wood cutting. Woodcutting can be a great hobby and a great way to pass time during winter for men. It is for the steadiest of men: men with steady arms and precision. Hence, it is also making it to the list for awesome winter hobbies for guys.

For men, it not only helps you get a better understanding of the different kinds of wood or but also the toughness of the wood-an ax works better here. It also comes as a great workout for men. Especially during winter if your house is located near a forest or in the countryside, then this hobby would prove to be extremely useful as well in fetching wood for your family or yourself to keep yourselves warm.

Therefore, it is not only a great winter hobby for men but as well as an essential skill to have.

4. Woodworks or Carpentry.

Making something out of nothing with just wood and just a few sets of hand tools can be extremely challenging. This can also attribute to one of the many reasons why people or men, in general, do not usually take up carpentry or woodworking as a hobby.

It would be best if you were focused and have a clear vision of what you are trying to make. These days where electric tools are available which can get your job done in minutes, people still tend to choose to do it the traditional way whenever possible.

As demanding as it might sound and doing it by hand can be very time-consuming. But however, you will gain this one significant achievement in the end. You will be left feeling like you’ve accomplished something great, and that tremendous sense of accomplishment is something money can’t buy.

4. Skiing/Snowboarding.

If you are more for the thrill and danger seeking kind of men, then Skiing/Snowboarding would prove to be an excellent hobby for you.

It is one of the best winter hobbies for men.

For Skiing and snowboarding, you would prefer to stay near an area with decent snowfall or near mountain slopes. But that would be necessary as you can go on trips even book to stay at resorts that provide these facilities. Although Skiing or snowboarding can be enjoyable, it is also leaning more towards an extreme sport.

Suppose you are not careful while Skiing; there are exceedingly high chances that you might get hurt. This can also be avoided by wearing proper gear and protection. If you are new to the sport, then you can always hire someone or take a friend that knows how to do it.

These days plenty of towns and cities have their very own dry ski slopes. You can always practice there till you get the hang of it and proceed accordingly. If learned well, it can prove to be one of the best hobbies to do in winter.

5. Learning the guitar.

Learning guitar can be a lot of fun, and along with it learning new songs. You can always record yourself playing and singing and upload on YouTube or social media as well. That is also how most of the Singer and songwriters these days started up.

Besides the fun and joy of learning new music playing guitar can be a form of therapy as well. It is found to relieve stress and enhances your creativity as well.

As a man, coming home from a stressful day at work and playing the guitar might be a form of stress relief and could be the difference between having a good night’s sleep as well. Studies have also shown that women love men who can play the guitar. So there, that is a bonus as well—another reason why you should grab yourself a guitar and start learning right away.

Who knows, you might be the next break out star.

6. Winter Hunting.

Another excellent hobby for men during winters is hunting. The thought of going out in the cold to hunt for wildlife can be the reason that is keeping you away from hunting. If you manage to take the first step of stepping out, then tracking in winter could prove to be more beneficial as well.

The challenges that winter brings, apart from the cold, can provide one of the best hunting experiences. Hunting in winter can provide you with that tasty winter meat to get home to have warm at the BBQ.

Apart from the challenges that winter brings to the table, there are also surprisingly several advantages to hunting in winter and why it makes for one of the best winter hobbies for men.

· Tracking animals during winter can be relatively made easy cause of the track marks on the snow. Thus, it makes it easier to track your game.

· You can also wear white clothing to blend in with the snow and trees, making it difficult for your prey to spot you.

· Lack of foliage (grass and leaves) due to the snow makes it easier for the hunter to spot the prey quickly.

· The snow also makes it easier for the hunter to drag a prey out on the snow.

· It also makes it easier for the hunter to spot and track blood trails.

7. Martial Arts 

If you are more of the kind of guy that loves pushing their body to new heights, then this hobby might be for you. As men, we feel a sense of duty to be able to protect our loved ones and our family. Learning Martial arts is not only an acceptable form of exercise but also helps us in self-defense.

Winter can also prove to be a perfect time to learn such skills. Instead of spending your time in the comfort of your couch watching television, learning martial arts can be a great hobby to pick up.

Some of the many benefits for learning martial arts for men and why it is also one of the best winter hobbies for guys are given below:

• It helps improve mental performance in men. This happens because we are always in situations where we must use the skill we learned and use it against an opponent or tackle new self-defense scenarios.
•  It helps in building your confidence. As you learn the new moves and skills to tackle various scenarios thrown at you, you slowly build trust. Building confidence helps in the overall outlook we have towards life as well.
• It improves strength, flexibility, and coordination within yourself.
• It teaches you to be vigilant and aware of your surroundings and to stay calm.
• Most importantly, whatever the type of martial arts we learn, they all teach us to have humility and respect for others and ourselves.

Conclusion

 To wrap it up, choose a hobby from the list of best winter hobbies for men given above. Choose something that speaks well to you from the hobbies to do in winter. Something that you have wanted to do for a long time. A hobby that will not only help you with what you are going through or a hobby to do just for the thrill and fun of doing it. In the end, whatever hobbies you end up choosing for the winter, be sure to enjoy and have fun doing it.