4 Tips For Fitness While You Travel
As many of you know I’m currently on an extended road trip and taking a hiatus from my normal routine. While travel and adventure is extremely rewarding for me, it also presents its own set of challenges.
When I’m on vacation I rarely workout. Usually I’m trying to take a break from exercise and the gym where I spend most of my life. For a lot of people this probably looks totally different, but my work is at the gym so my vacation is the time I get away from it. But now, instead of a regular weeklong vacation, I am gone for about a month. This has gotten me thinking about how to maintain my fitness, while also explore some other ways to train given my situation.
I’m very routine-oriented. I like to get up about the same time, eat similar things, and exercise around the same time each day. I find this to be a key to success in fitness because so much of it requires repetition. No progress will ever be made in fitness without embracing routine.
So, as you can imagine finding a routine is difficult when driving long days through another country, through cities and towns you don’t know, trying to get the dogs some exercise in the midst of 8-10 hours in the truck, and having little access to the foods I normally eat.
My wife and I often talk about the difference between “vacation” and “travel”. Both are fun, but I think the difference is that vacation offers a time to relax and remove yourself from the daily grind and routine, and take an emotional and mental break from your daily life. Travel, on the other hand, is about actively seeking new experiences and learning about the world and people in other places. So, as I travel, I’m trying to learn more about what it means to prioritize my fitness and health while on the go. These are 4 things I realized in my first couple of weeks on the road...
1. Simplify.
Don’t try to make the perfect workouts, training plans, or even worry about progression. Worry about maintaining your physical and mental health with exercise.
Far too often I think people waste energy on trying to perfect the details around their training without realizing that adding complexity usually isn’t the answer. In fact, it is probably the opposite - Simplify. By keeping a simple format I knew I would have effective, challenging workouts that would keep me fit and keep my mind right. Here’s the format I used:
(a) Choose a lower body exercise: Squat, hinge, lunge, etc
(b) Choose an upper body push: Push Press, floor press, push up, etc
(c) Choose an upper body pull: Gorilla row, Bent over row, pull-up, etc
(d) Choose a rotational / core movement: Windmill, slasher, plank variations, etc.
I switched these up every day and went to near failure on 2-3 sets with whatever weights I had. That’s it. Pair them up and keep it to about 30-40 minutes of total work.
Your training while traveling or on vacation is not necessarily about leveling up your fitness, its about maintaining some routines and not falling off the rails entirely. Enjoy yourself and stick to full body workouts with a quick pace to keep your heart rate elevated and body working. Don’t worry about anything else.
2. Focus on effort, not reps.
My wife would work out with me most mornings and when I give her the exercises she would often ask “how many reps?”. My response was always “As many as you can get, but leave 1 or 2 in the tank.” This concept of RPE - rate of perceived exertion - is perfect for this scenario. An RPE of 8/10 or 9/10 means I’m working hard but not going to total failure, just leaving a couple of reps in the tank. I can slow the movement down for longer contractions, I can be flexible with the number of reps I perform and just focus on putting a hard effort in on each set regardless of the weight.
For our gym here, we have 3 sets of kettlebells - a pair of 24kg, 16kg and 12kg bells is all we have to work with, so the idea is that when we are limited in our choices for loading, we should be more flexible in our rep schemes and tempos. The most important thing here isn’t the amount of weight used, but rather the amount of effort put forth. Go to near failure on a few sets of whatever exercises you choose.
3. Change things up.
The idea here is that traveling and being in a different place offers us a chance to explore some new things, even with exercise. Think of your travel time as a mini training cycle to focus on weaknesses or learn new movements. To be honest with you, I really don’t enjoy zone 2 work. I know my fitness suffers a little because I don’t like the monotony of long bouts of low intensity exercise. This trip will give me an opportunity to put more work in that area of my fitness.
I do a decent amount of spinning on the concept 2 bike while at the gym, but I almost never run anymore. As it turns out, the house I’m staying at has a long, gradual hill in front of it. One of my workouts while I’m here is walking down the hill and running back up (slowly) for about 30-45 minutes. I haven’t done a workout like this in years, and it will be a fun way to mix it up in the mornings before breakfast while I listen to a podcast or some new music. I’m not good at it, but that’s the point.
4. Walk more.
Last and definitely not least is walking. The best way to explore new places I’ve found is to walk around. A brisk walk is also a great way to incorporate some good aerobic work each day. I’m aiming for ~12k steps per day of brisk walking which helps with improving my mood, increasing my activity level for a better metabolism, and allows me to soak up some vitamin D. I’ve also met some new people, and found a couple of cool restaurants and bars that I never would have seen while driving. Do not underestimate how good walking is for you!!
For more travel workouts, email us at info@altitudeathletics.com and get a copy of our bodyweight and dumbbell programs.
-John