Staying fit while traveling can be hard for digital nomads. It’s a cliché you’ve heard talked about time and time again from people when they take off for the holidays or head off on a trip somewhere – the “inevitable” holiday or trip weight gain. Well, clichés are clichés for a reason, and it’s true that more often than not, most people have a hard time keeping from falling into this trap. Being surrounded by delicious new treats while traveling and far away from your gym and regular workout routine, it can seem impossible to keep the weight off while traveling. But does it have to be this way?
It can be tricky, but keeping the pounds off and staying fit while traveling is totally doable as long as you make an effort and don’t throw your hands up in the air before you’ve even begun traveling. In fact, with a little careful planning and strategizing, there isn’t a reason you can’t come back even fitter than when you left. After all, what better time to try out new routines and new ways of doing things than when you’re removed from your natural environment. Below you can see that with the right activities and lifestyle staying fit while traveling isn’t only easy, but fun!
The Ultimate Guide to Staying Fit While Traveling
Keeping Active
- Walking Tours
If you want to explore a new city and keep up your step count without even noticing, this is the way to go. It’s easy to cover 30,000 steps a day while taking part in walking tours or self-exploring around the neighborhoods of a city. The constant stimulation from the different sights, smells, and sounds act as a welcome distraction from just how many calories you are burning while pounding the pavement!
Walking tours are the best way to see a city. When you’re wanting to see everything up close while keeping fit, there’s no better way to go than a guided walking tour. You’ll be surprised at just how many exciting things you can find out about a city by exploring its streets and notching up that step count. These types of trips are also a fantastic way to meet friends and travel buddies while out on the road. After a day of learning incredible things about the city you’re in and sharing it with a stranger, you’ll be friends before you know it! You get to walk away healthier and hit up the nightlife with a new buddy to blow a few of those calories you burnt off. You earned it!
- Hiking
After you’re done exploring the city, seeing all of the fantastic nightlife, and indulging in the local cuisine, you should set your sights on the surrounding nature. The city life is great, but often people on the road forget about the fantastic world around them when they get distracted by all the sights and sounds of a bustling city. To get the complete cultural experience, you need to head off into the wilderness to get a proper feel for a place. See where the city originally sprang to life from.
Trekking is a fantastic way to explore this side of a new place and one of the best possible things you can do for your body. Strapping on your pack, setting off on the trail, soaking in the beautiful foreign nature, and meeting people along the way is the best way to rejuvenate your mind and body.
- Swimming
While you’re out there trekking through the forest, jungle, or around mountains, make sure you packed away a good swimsuit! Swimming can shred the weight off you fast, so be prepared to jump in and enjoy all those beaches, rivers, and lakes you see along the way. Nothing is more refreshing than diving into crisp fresh water after a day of hard trekking and sweating. Splashing around and swimming some laps in the water is a perfect way to not only burn calories but reinvigorate you for the trek ahead.
If you’re passing on the trekking, you can still hit up the hotel pool to get those laps in. After all of that walking around the city, there’s nothing better than a few laps in the hotel pool to burn some calories and recharge you for the night ahead. If you are staying in a place that doesn’t have a pool keep in mind that there are usually at least a few hotels or resorts in any given city that will allow you to buy a day pass to their facilities. So, just google what’s available around you and dive in!
- Hotel or Local Gym
Sometimes people need a bit of their old routine to keep on top of things, and if this is you, that’s okay too. When you’re planning your trip to a new city, try to keep a lookout for hotels that have a gym. Let’s be honest, most hotel gyms aren’t going to come stocked with all of the equipment that you’ve come to know and love. Still, there’s usually enough there to be able to google how to work out the different muscle groups with what you’ve got. Also, as long as you’re getting in enough steps while exploring the city, you shouldn’t worry too much about the cardio side of things.
Just like the day passes for hotel pools, you could also consider getting a day pass for another hotel gym if yours doesn’t have the equipment or the equipment you like. Most metropolitan cities, or cities that cater to a lot of tourists, have plenty of gyms that offer one day or one week passes. Going this route will allow you to find the perfect gym that meets all of your needs, so you don’t have to make any concessions on gym quality. This is also the ideal chance to maybe try out that yoga or kickboxing class that you’ve always wanted to give a go. Why not try something new in a new place? You could come home with a new favorite hobby!
- Water, Water, and More Water
While you’re walking around all the streets of a new city, trekking through the wilderness, swimming at the beach, or enjoying that workout class you’ve always wanted to try, you must go out of your way to keep hydrated. With all of that moving around it can be easier than you think to forget to drink the right amount of water and if you are sticking to the advice above you will be needing a lot of it. If you aren’t ensuring that you have the proper water uptake, you’re going to lose your energy and crash fast, leaving you unable to not only stick to your workout routine but unable to enjoy your trip properly.
Healthy lifestyle
- Make Sure to Catch Those Z’s
When living it up traveling the world, enjoying the new sights and sounds, it can be so easy to put a decent night’s sleep on the back burner. After all, when you’re spending the day enjoying the museums, coffee shops, and museums while at the same time hitting up the local nightlife in the evenings, it can be incredibly tempting to give up sleep in order to make time for all of the activities you want to pack in.
You must resist the urge to do this. Not getting in enough sleep raises your cortisol levels, which not only makes it incredibly challenging to lose weight, it makes you highly susceptible to gaining weight. Apart from this, even though you may be wanting to give up sleep so you can pack in more experiences, you won’t be able to enjoy them if you’re walking around like a zombie. Make sure you get those 7 to 8 hours so you can start each day off fresh and ready to soak it all in!
- Cut Back on the Beer
Traveling around and meeting new people always seems to go hand in hand with drinking large quantities of beer for many people. Hitting up all those cool new nightlife spots in a new city, giving cheers with new friends or having a pint at a fun pub you stumbled upon is a highlight of of many travel experiences. Unfortunately, all of this beer packs on the calories like nothing else, and if you’re doing this a lot while you’re traveling, you will definitely be returning from your trip with at least a little extra padding around the mid-section.
Something about beer while traveling makes it go down like water, but try your best to resist it. If you want to avoid this super unhealthy trap, try switching up your drink of choice to a dry red or a spirit. Doing this allows you to still enjoy your casual drinking while making the most out of the nightlife. You can dance the night away with new friends or your travel buddy, lifting a glass to a fantastic journey without worrying about coming back bloated with a beer belly. You want to come back from your amazing trip looking refreshed from your travels, and avoiding overindulging on beer is one of the best methods of staying fit while traveling.
- Protein Over Carbs
Here is another excellent lifestyle tactic that can go a long way in keeping you fit while traveling. Avoiding carbs as best you can will help you just as much as watching the beer intake. Carbs are the enemy to keeping the weight off, so be extremely careful with how much pasta you are plowing through in all of those delicious restaurants you’ll be visiting. Shoveling your face full of bread at those fun little corner cafés in Europe is great, but it will easily break any diet plan you’re trying to stick to.
With a careful strategy, you can keep satisfied and avoid falling into the carb trap. Try everything you can to choose the protein option over the pasta bowl. Almost every place you visit will have incredibly delicious local protein-based dishes that will be just as fun to sample instead of a bowl of pasta or basket of bread. Filling up on the yummy plates of local salad, fish, and meat will also give a huge boost to your energy levels, fueling your days walking the city streets and the exercise routine that you established for yourself.
- Intermittent Fasting
If you’re not one of those people that get incredibly hangry if you skip a meal here and there, you should definitely consider intermittent fasting. Basically, intermittent fasting is when you pick an 8-hour window during the day, and that is the only time that you allow yourself to eat. So, if you can keep your eating window from between 3pm and 11pm, you could see a good amount of weight loss on your vacation, or at the very least, keep your weight even. You can pick any part of the day that works best for you, but keeping it in the latter part of the day is usually the simplest as it’s the time that’s often much more popular for going out and having fun dining.
Intermittent fasting works because during your fasting period, the insulin levels in your body drop dramatically, causing your cells to unload glucose and your body to feed off the fat in your cells. In addition to helping you lose weight, this type of fasting can help lower cholesterol, improve glucose control, improve blood pressure, and reduce liver fat. As you can see there are considerable benefits to intermittent fasting and it’s the perfect eating style while on vacation. You can make it a point to keep the first part of your day filled with visiting all of the sites you want to see and save the splurging on food and drink for the later part of your day.
Hope you enjoyed this post on how to stay fit while traveling! If you have any thoughts, leave us a note in the comments below!
