Looking for a way to stay in shape while you’re traveling? Today we’ll show you how to keep your gains on the road.
If you’re a fitness lover who loves to travel, you’ve got a challenge on your hands. After all, whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, you’re going to be eating and moving around differently. Pretty much your entire schedule will change.
So the question is: how do you stay on your fitness game when you’re traveling?
It can be especially tough if you’re traveling for business. Because a jam-packed schedule generally means there isn’t much time for meal prep, sometimes you end up grabbing for some regrettable food choices.
Do you really think you’re at your best at that business conference when you’re running on cheese danish?
It’s also pretty common for people to get derailed on their fitness plans from the routine change of a vacation or business trip.
The good news is it doesn’t have to be painful. You can still travel without gaining weight, and you can do it without following a hardcore eating schedule.
It might sound like an impossible feat, but we can tell you it isn’t. Today, we’ll share a few techniques that can keep you going strong with our travel workout and nutrition plan.
Travel Workout Eating Tips: Adapting Your Routine to Maintain Your Progress
We’ll talk about the right diet first. Just because you’re away on business or vacation doesn’t mean your good eating habits have to fall by the wayside. It does however mean that you need to be prepared, bring some of your food and have a little discipline.
Travel Workout Eating Tip: You will be tempted by junk food when you’re traveling, pack a supply of healthy snacks to reach your macronutrient goals each day and beat hunger cravings.
When you think of traveling, what do you think of? Probably the sun, the pool, or airports. You might also think you’re going to be eating out a lot. And when you travel, keeping a grip on the amount of calories you take in during the day is one of the more difficult parts.
Sometimes we get excited about some restaurant or another on the agenda and pretty much just stop caring all together about the downside of what we’re eating.
Wouldn’t your rather feel healthy on the road?
Of course, restaurant foods always come packed with a lot more butter/oil/sugar than what we think. There are plenty of hidden calories, so we’re often eating more than we think. When it comes to those hotel breakfasts, the real deal on sugar is that it’s poison to your diet and causes weight gain.
Needless to say, eating more calories, plus not exercising as much because you’re traveling is pretty bad news for your progress so far.
Plus, it’s pretty hard to keep track of where your daily calories are coming from, whether it’s protein, carbs or fats, because you aren’t the one making the meals.
This can be especially hard if you’re on a weightlifting regimen and you can’t get enough protein. Couple this up with not getting enough exercise and you’re going to see a decrease in muscle pretty quickly.
See also: How much daily protein do you need to build muscle?
Luckily, there are a few things you can do to avoid this while also keeping up with the flexibility you have to have while you’re traveling.
Pillars of a Travel Workout Regimen: Get Your Macros
First and foremost, make sure you get enough protein during the day. One of the easiest ways to make sure you get the ideal amount of protein per day is by remembering to pack your blender bottle and a supply of clean filtered whey protein powder. Protein is critical to keeping your muscle preserved, so getting enough of it is key every day, whether you workout that day or not.
Protein Tip: Aim for about 1 gram of protein for every pound of body weight you have or are trying to get to.
And the easiest way to do this is to get a diet app, something like MyFitnessPal. This can help you not only keep track of everything you’re eating, but also research the different foods you’re eating or considering during the day.
Apps like this take out the guesswork and enable you to make better choices with what you’re eating during the day.
Then, you want to make sure your meals match up with your goals. Before you even think about meal planning while traveling, take a second and consider what exactly you want or are willing to allow to happen to your body while you’re gone. If you decide it’s your time to take in a few extra calories and relax your strict eating habits, that’s your choice too. Either way, you should be intentional and set your goals and limitations before your trip. Then you can tailor your travel workout and choose the best diet for YOUR body and goals.
Setting Goals for Your Travel Workout: Lose, Gain or Maintain?
Do you want to keep losing more weight? Or do you want to just maintain? Are you OK with gaining some weight, as long as it’s not a lot?
Set goals for yourself and then make sure your meals match up with these goals. If you’re OK gaining some weight that means you can splurge occasionally throughout your trip. We’re not against the benefit of a cheat meal here and there.
If you want to continue losing weight, it’ll be harder but in the end, worth it. You just have to keep your meals simple. If you eat out too much, especially at faster food restaurants, you’re going to reverse your weight loss process.
Here’s what you should do instead; create a fairly simple meal plan.
This should consist of foods you can pick up at just about any grocery store or local health food spot. You don’t have to write it all out, after all you’re on vacation, but having these options will keep you out of the nutrition gutter. You should focus on foods that don’t require much prep or cooking.
Here are a few low prep macronutrient-rich options you can bring on your trip:
- Protein powders
- fruits
- salads with dressing
- rotisserie chicken,
- cottage cheese
- almonds
- Greek yogurt
- and almond butter
Then, when you go to book your hotel, double check to make sure they have a fridge in the room. If you’re able to upgrade to a bigger fridge, do it.
Once you land or arrive at the destination, just head to the store, grab what you need and put it in the fridge. It’s not going to be anything thrilling to eat but it’ll help you stay on the right track.
Now if you want to simply maintain, you’re going to be a little more flexible with your meals. If you need a number to go on, multiply your weight times 15 and that’s how many calories you need in order to maintain.
And the easiest way to do this is by having a few planned meals while incorporating a few unplanned meals. But we aren’t saying go all out for those unplanned meals. Keep it simple and track the best you can with your app.
You may feel like some days have you feeling more full than others, and that’s to be expected. Just don’t go into overdrive and eat more than you need to more than once or twice a week. Remember, whether you’re traveling or not, caloric deficit is the only way that you will lose fat at the end of the day.
We all know that one cheat meal can suddenly turn into an all out binge session, so make sure to keep a lid on it. If necessary, you can always cut back on the your meal frequency as well. While you may aim for 5 to 7 smaller meals throughout your normal day, shoot for bigger meals that have more calories while you’re traveling.
For example, for your 8 AM meal, aim for 35 grams of protein, with 90 grams of carbs and 20 grams of fat. That should hold you over until about noon, which is when you can have 40 grams of protein, 10 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fat. By 4 PM, have another 30 grams of protein, with 5 grams of carbs and fat. Then, at 7 PM, have 30 grams of protein again with 60 grams of fat and cut out the carbs for night time.
This specific style of dieting is called flexible dieting, and it’s the perfect solution or when you’re traveling. It does an awesome job at keeping our daily food intake at bay without you having to rearrange your entire life to make it work.
And don’t worry about cutting back on meal frequency and your metabolism – it won’t make you gain weight.
Intermittent Fasting While Traveling?
While we’re on the topic of different styles of dieting, lets take a look at intermittent fasting. This is the kind of diet that focuses on restricting your intake of food for longer periods of time. Then, when you have your “feeding window, you eat your entire day’s worth of food.
Let’s say you don’t eat at all for 16 hours a day. Then, you can eat for the remaining 8 hours in the day.
So if you fast for 16 hours, you can’t have any food whatsoever. You can have coffee and tea and 0 calorie drinks but that is it. Then you have an 8-hour window in which you can eat a ton of protein and more carbs and calories, especially on training days.
But the huge “but” to point out here is that you can’t use this kind of fasting as an excuse to over-eat. After all, if you’re eating extra amounts of calories each day, it’s impossible for your body to block out fat.
If you want to give it a shot, try the following regimen.
Travel Workout Diet & Nutrition: Intermittent Fasting Plan
At 9 AM, have a 0-calorie drink, such as tea or coffee. Throughout the day, have tons of water, but not any food until you break the fast. At 1 PM, go to a restaurant (which we know are plentiful while on vacation) and get a big meal. You can have a steak, with the bread basket, and the baked potato. You even can have dessert. Check in with your Fitness Pal to make sure your meal has somewhere around 30 grams for protein, 130 grams for carbs and around 30 grams for fat.
At 5 PM, have about 40 grams of protein and at 8 PM, a similar regimen of 30 grams/proteins and 40 grams/fats. Here, you get to enjoy two fairly big meals. And you’ll be stuffed so you can make it until noon or 1 PM the following day.
As long as you can handle these fasting times, it’s an awesome way to cut back on fat storage, while also eating some good food. It’s the perfect solution for while you travel – it doesn’t disturb you or anyone else’s schedule.
Working Out While You Travel
And now, what you’ve been waiting for – working out while you travel. While you might think this is pretty difficult, it isn’t too bad as long as you are willing to adapt and not make excuses to skip it. We have a few pointers that might make it easier for you.
First, try to stay in a hotel that is located near a gym. Even if you can’t fit in a workout until 11 PM, just remember this is temporary. Or, if your hotel has a gym, utilize it. We know hotel gyms don’t exactly have the best rep but honestly, it’s better than doing nothing. Generally, these types of gyms have some light weights and machines, so aim for a 30 to 45 minute session that works your entire body. It should also be something you can do every day.
Ultimate Travel Workout: Hotel Room Style
The other option you have is working out in your hotel room. Having a device like the TRX Training System can help you do a ton of different body exercises. All you need to set it up is a door and it only weighs 2 pounds.
If you want to just do a workout in your room without the fancy equipment try this one:
Do push ups until you’re unable to do any more. Give yourself a rest for 60 seconds. Then do squats for 30 seconds. Halfway through, switch to one-legged squats if you can. Go right into burpees for another 30 seconds. Next, go to mountain climbers until you can’t do anymore and rest for 90 seconds. Now, do crunches until you can’t do anymore. Give yourself a 60 second rest, then start back up with the push ups. Doing this for 20 to 30 minutes is a great workout.
When you can, do some HIIT cardio. If you want to take a break from the hotel gym or want to add it to your regimen already, do 20 to 30 minutes of HIIT to burn off any extra calories you might have accidentally picked up along the way.
You can use a recumbent bike or do 30 second sprints, followed up with 60-second rests with a lower resistance.
Also, when you can, workout right before a meal. Training before a meal helps you stay on track better because it cuts own on your body’s glycogen stores. So when this happens, your body is able to restock these stores, and it uses back up carbs to do this. And your body wont store carbs you eat as fat until those glycogen levels are restocked.
So when you cut back on your glycogen stores before eating, you’re essentially give yourself some extra wiggle room with carbs.
Conclusion
You don’t have to choose between fitness and travel, but you do have to make some changes. If you do things the way everyone else does, you’ll look like everyone else. If you make a commitment to workout, even if it just means 100 pushups in your hotel room, it makes all the difference. And when it comes to nutrition on the road, the biggest hurdle when it comes to nutrition on the road is maintaining enough protein to keep or build muscle. So, even if your friends call you meat head for bringing protein powder on the road, you can laugh at them at the pool when you’re on top of your game. Remember, vacation is no excuse not to exercise!
-Terry Asher
Terry
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