Don’t let an upcoming trip derail your healthy routine. Instead, use these five tips to stay on track toward your wellness goals.
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Stick to Your Fitness Routine
Resist the urge to take a week off from fitness, although modifying your routine is completely acceptable. For example, many hotels offer fitness centers for guest use. No, it likely won’t be a full-service facility, but there should be enough equipment to get a quick workout each day. It is also a good idea to familiarize yourself with a few bodyweight routines if you stay somewhere without a fitness center.
If supplements are part of your regular fitness routine, be sure to include them as well. For example, considering you may be missing some nutrients on the road, making a shake with whey isolate protein powder after your gym session can really help your body recover.
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Plan Your Meals Ahead of Time
Finding yourself away from home without familiar food resources can lead to questionable decisions. For example, you may overindulge in a local restaurant or pick up takeout for every meal. Obviously, neither of those will move you closer to long-term health goals. However, you can break this cycle with a little advanced planning.
This is not to say that you need to know everything you are going to eat throughout your trip before you leave home. That will take a good chunk of fun out of your adventures, not to mention undermine any sense of spontaneity. What it does mean is that you want to at least familiarize yourself with a few local restaurants that offer healthful options, look over online menus before eating out, and grab a stock of fresh fruits and vegetables for in-room snacking.
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Avoid Disrupting Your Sleep Schedule
Sleep is vital for overall health and well-being. Most adults need about seven or eight hours of solid rest each day for optimal functioning. One way to get that is by establishing an evening routine and sticking with it. Unfortunately, that can be difficult in new and changing surroundings.
Difficult and impossible are definitely not the same things, so set your sights on the goal of keeping your evening routine mostly intact. This may involve steps such as heading to dinner earlier than you otherwise would when traveling, skipping a nightcap at the hotel bar, and avoiding late-night social events. While it is fine to have a late night here and there, keep in mind that even one night of poor-quality sleep can lead to irritability and confusion.
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Choose Active Transportation
Active transportation is, as its name implies, getting around under your own physical power. Some examples include:
- Riding a bicycle
- Walking and running
- Skating or rollerblading
These are all excellent ways to get in some physical activity while also enjoying new places. It is also a great way to see things you might miss sitting in a car or bus.
Choosing active transportation doesn’t mean that you should ride a bike on an interstate business trip, but it probably wouldn’t hurt you to walk between buildings once you get to your destination city.
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Sip Wisely
Vacations (and even business trips) make it far too easy to say yes to a few extra drinks. A mimosa at brunch, a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and a cocktail before an evening show, and you’ve crossed well over recommended moderate drinking limits before you know what happened.
The best way to avoid this pitfall is to track your eating and drinking throughout the day. If you don’t already have one on your phone, find one you like and get familiar with it before your trip.
It can be challenging to maintain a healthy routine while on the road. However, it is possible. Planning meals ahead of time, engaging in physical activities, and sticking to a sleep schedule are just a few of the strategies that can help.
