10 Ways to Stay Fit While Traveling

When you travel, do you leave your healthy habits at home?

On business trips, it’s easy to overdo it with carb-fest lunches and expense account dinners, sedentary meetings, and late nights at the hotel bar. (It’s networking, right?)

And pleasure trips are all about cutting loose, living it up. But do you really want to return home feeling worse than when you left?

A far more satisfying way to travel is to stay active and fuel your body and mind with all the things that keep it running at its best.

Try just a few changes in your travel habits and you’ll be sharper and more effective on business trips, and more alert, comfortable, and energetic on vacation.

1. Sign Up for Streaming Workouts

Whether you’re on the road for business or pleasure, then you’re probably traveling with your phone, iPad, laptop — or all three.

With streaming workouts, you can do a quick workout before you head out to see the sights or after a long day of business meetings.

Don’t want to work out in your hotel room?

Stream programs like 4 Weeks for Every Body, Sure Thing, CHOP WOOD CARRY WATER, or hundreds of other workouts on BODi, no matter where you are.

2. Explore the Local Area on Foot

If you really want to get a feel for a place you’ve traveled to, the best way to see it is by walking.

If you’re on a business trip, try to schedule it so that you can walk to at least some of your meetings. Skip the Uber unless you’re late, it’s raining like crazy, or your destination is more than a mile or two away.

Also, avoid the hotel dining room. Instead, walk to a restaurant. You’ll probably get a more satisfying meal at half the cost.

You’ll also see some street life on the way — businesses opening their doors, sidewalks getting swept, and locals waiting for the bus, or hurrying to work.

3. Use the Hotel Gym

Some people thrive on routine. If you have a regular gym schedule that’s working for you, then continue it while you’re away.

Keep your healthy habit going, and it won’t be a struggle to get back to it when you return home.

Most hotels have some sort of gym or exercise facility, and if they don’t have any equipment that you can (or want) to use, do a streaming workout on your phone or laptop.

At the other extreme, you may find that your hotel has a big, glamorous gym with machines you’ve never used before.

Schedule a session with a personal trainer to learn how to use the stuff, and experience your workout as a novelty and a pleasure.

Your hotel might also have a great sauna or steam room, and maybe they offer spa services that are new to you.

Schedule a Thai massage or some other kind of therapy that sounds interesting. Travel is about experiencing the new and the novel.

Apply this attitude to your exercise routine as well, and you’ll find that even your same old workout in a new setting can be a treat.

4. Take the Stairs

This one’s easy. Never, ever take the elevator, unless you’re schlepping luggage. No excuses.

It doesn’t matter how many flights up your room is — take the stairs. In fact, book a high floor. Better views from the room, and more calories burned to get there!

5. Check Out Local Activities

Whatever your destination, there’s probably some kind of sport or physical activity that’s popular in the area.

Go skiing, hiking, bouldering, or climbing if you’re in the mountains.

At the beach, take a surfing lesson, or boogie board, or at least get off your beach blanket and actually swim in the ocean.

Near a river or lake? Spend an afternoon canoeing, sailing, or rafting.

In urban parks, there are inevitably pickup games of soccer, ultimate frisbee, and basketball. Big cities are also rife with climbing gyms, martial arts dojos, a million yoga emporiums, and even dance studios.

Think how much more fun your museum day would be if you capped it off with a salsa lesson!

6. Rent a Bike

Many major cities have “smart bikes” with checkout stations all over town that allow users to pick up a bicycle in one location and drop it off in another.

These are great for urban commuters but are also ideal for tourists since the services tend to be located in the busiest core of cities.

Get around town on a bike and you’re sure to see more of it.

Beaches and other tourist destinations almost always have rental services that allow you to take out a bike by the hour or by the day.

Have you been curious to try a recumbent bicycle, or a bicycle built for two? Rent one. Take it for a spin up and down the boardwalk and see what you think.

If you’re traveling by car, load up the bike rack and vow to leave the car parked once you arrive. In crowded resort towns, you’ll be pleased as punch as you pedal past cranky tourists stuck in high-season traffic.

7. Maintain At Least One Healthy Habit, No Matter What

Vacations are notorious for undoing months of virtuous diet and exercise.

This may have a little something to do with a steady holiday diet of fried appetizer platters and piña coladas.

However, what really derails a healthy fitness routine is an interruption to it. But it’s a vacation! It’s time for a break!

True enough, but consider keeping just one healthy habit while you’re away, to keep your momentum going.

For example, go to bed at your normal time (if you’re happy with that habit), or wake up at your normal time.

If you have a yoga or meditation practice, continue doing even a very abbreviated version of it.

Or bring simple equipment from your exercise routine that can easily fit in your suitcase for modified workouts.

Or, if you’re used to a specific healthy breakfast every morning, keep eating it every day.

Make a promise to keep one good thing going, and then follow through on that commitment. This will create a powerful sense of control and continuity that will make it easier to get back on the health and fitness wagon when you return home.

8. Have a Cheat Day

Early in your trip, pick one day to indulge. Eat like a starving hound. Stay up too late. You’ve been dreaming about this holiday for months, so enjoy it.

When you wake up the next morning, notice how you feel. Don’t gulp down your usual hangover remedies, whatever they may be, and don’t have a big guilt trip.

Simply notice what is going on with your body. Let yourself feel it. Ask yourself if you want to feel like this every morning of your vacation.

Later in the day, when you’re thinking of having a fourth mai tai or a second dessert, bring your mind back to what it was like when you woke up. No judgment, no worries.

Just remember how you physically felt. Then make a conscious decision about whether or not you want to feel that way again tomorrow morning. If you do this on day one or two, maybe the lesson will sink in.

9. Downshift

Our lifestyle today is so fast-paced, frenetic, and stressful that it can be hard to downshift into vacation mode.

That go-go-go attitude can cause you to miss what’s right in front of you.

Are you back for a third helping at the all-you-can-eat buffet on the pool deck, and you can’t specifically recall what was on your first or second plate?

Relax. There’s more than enough food for everyone, and no rush for you to finish eating. Remember, you’re on vacation.

Slow down and enjoy whatever you’re eating, whether it’s “healthy” or not. Relish it. If you focus on and savor your food, you won’t eat as much.

That’s not the reason to slow down, though. Go slow so that you can truly enjoy every single, delicious bite.

10. Make Your Vacation an Adventure

Do you really just want to sit on the beach for a week and drink? (Wait. Don’t answer that.) The best way to stay fit when you’re on vacation is to get out and do stuff.

If you have been taking good care of yourself — working out, eating right, getting enough sleep — then you have been in training for real-life adventures.

Reward yourself on your next holiday. Pick a fun, physically active adventure, and build a trip around it.

Before you go on autopilot and book the usual beach holiday, think for a minute.

Do a little research and book a trip that excites you and makes you a little nervous. These are the eyes wide open, active experiences that you will remember for the rest of your life.

As an added bonus (not that you need one), you’ll return from an adventure vacation looking and feeling exhilarated, recharged, inspired, and even more fit and fabulous than when you left home.