How to Maintain Your Fitness While on Vacation

You love to do your workout thing, whether it’s endurance focused like running, biking or swimming, or strength oriented like a gym or at-home weights routine, or yoga or conditioning classes. But then it’s vacation time and, while you do love a good vacation, you’re a little worried about that fitness you’ve been building. How can you maintain it? Won’t you lose it all if you don’t stick with your steady every day workouts? Let’s take a look at this with a fitness coach, shall we?

Hey Hikers! Get ready for hiking with the Unstill Life crew in our outdoor workouts. We are chock full of hikers who like to build and maintain fitness for outdoor adventures. Your community awaits. Sign up for our newsletter to know what we’re doing. And now, on with today’s post.

As with most fitness coaching questions, there are many answers to this question. And how you relate to it and solve it will be unique to you. But there are a few skills wrapped up in sorting this out, and most folks will have tons of options when they focus on those skills.

Before we get into it, let’s look at two training populations: Specific Event Training Folks, and General Fitness Folks. If you are training for a very specific thing, like a marathon, or a multi-day trek, it may be more important for you to stick to your training plan than if you are building or maintaining fitness more generally. And timeframe matters too, such as whether your vacation will be a week long or a month long. So let’s consider both of those questions out of the gate.

Most people are surprised to learn that they don’t lose fitness if they take a break of two weeks or less. Specific Event Training folks who are traveling for more than two weeks, you may need to keep up some of your key workouts (longer runs for marathon runners, back-to-back hikes for you multi-day trekkers). But if you are vacationing for 1-2 weeks, you have a lot more freedom in what you can do in terms of workouts while you travel and still not lose fitness.

For most people, the skills you need to focus on for maintaining and enhancing fitness while on vacation are being flexible and creative, being on the lookout for active touring options, doing advanced research and focusing on consistent movement over lengthy specific workouts. You may not be able to continue doing exactly what you do in your home environment, but you have lots of options that have true fitness benefits.

Be Flexible, Creative and Make It Part of Your Travel Experience

There are usually many ways to build cardio exercise into travel and vacation experiences. It may not be the cardio you’re used to doing, but that very variety would be a welcome change to your body and stimulate new fitness. Rather than fixate on getting in so many runs of a certain distance, consider if you can walk, hike, bike, kayak as part of your travels. Whether you design your trip specifically to include this, or just fit it in ad hoc along the way, renting bikes or kayaks, or taking extended walking tours will add to your unique experience of the place you visit as well as enhance your fitness.

Research Ahead

You may need to do a little ground work to set yourself up for success in running, walking or cycling. You can find local running and cycling routes using apps like MapMyRun, MapMyRide or TrailForks. Trail reports and downloadable GPS tracks can give you good intel on routes and make way-finding easy. Explore parks and neighborhoods with an eye toward what they afford for exercise. Use those playgrounds, benches, picnic tables, hills, boulders to develop organic movement sessions. Yeah, that’s the Unstill Life way.

Equipment – Borrow or Bring

If you are looking to keep up strength training, yoga or conditioning, check with your hotel or vacation rental manager about gym or recreational facilities on-site or nearby. Many hotels offer dumbbells and yoga mats for guests to use in their rooms. And vacation rentals know guests value and expect special features like this, so don’t be shy about asking. You can also get drop-in day memberships at local gyms and take classes there. Are you visiting a region or culture that is passionate about a particular sport or dance? Get a private lesson or take a class. What cooler way to connect with locals in the places you visit but to exercise, play and move with them.

You can also bring your own portable equipment. The two items I recommend most often, which are compact, but offer a lot of variety are resistance bands and a jump rope. Reminder too that you can also get superb benefits from a bodyweight workout. A 10-minute bodyweight or high-intensity interval sequence can boost your metabolism all day. And you always have the Unstill Life on-demand video library at your disposal.

Take a Break, but then Get Your Groove Back

Consider just taking a dang break and enjoying organic fun movement without questioning if it’s a good enough workout. A break from training can be perfect for integrating adaptations from training you do at home. And keep in mind that another very important skill is getting back to your routine when you return. It can be easy to lose your rhythm and allow your vacation to throw your fitness habits off for much longer. So when you return, be intentional in putting fitness practices back into your days right away, even if the activities are small so the vacation doesn’t completely de-rail you.

Jump on our Heylo site and sign up for a class or walk/run. Unstill Life will help you keep your fitness groove.