A 4 Step Guide to Keep Fit While Travelling

Your relationship with fitness won’t be precisely the same as at home, but it doesn’t need to drop off completely. If you’re looking for a guide to keep fit while travelling, read on to find out more.

First of all, accept that your fitness regime will have to change compared to what you’re used to at home.

This, by the way, is totally okay.

If you try to stick to a specific regime too closely while travelling, it could take away from the reasons for travelling in the first place. If you’re struggling to figure out your plane times because you have to fit in your bi-weekly yoga class, it’s probably a sign that you need to relax a bit about your routine to keep fit while travelling.

It’s essential to accept this early on. If not, it can cause problems at the planning stage of your trip (like in our plane/yoga example), but it could go on far longer than that. Maybe you’ll manage to plan around your exercise routine, but then it starts affecting your experiences while travelling. You have to choose between a once-in-a-lifetime experience or your weekly run, which puts you in a difficult spot. The last thing you want is for fitness guilt to cast a shadow over your travelling!

A final reason to accept changes to your routine early on is that this allows you to continue your fitness in a way that’ll work for you. We’ll get onto how to do that in just a moment, but the point is that it will allow you to choose for those changes to happen rather than looking back guiltily at your missed goals. If you plan to run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then miss the first one, there’s a good chance you won’t actually do the other two, either. It would be pretty easy for this to spiral into not looking after your fitness at all, which isn’t necessary.

Accept some changes, but keep moving forward.

So now that you’ve accepted you’ll have to change your plans, you need to figure out what you’ll do instead. Our advice? Make your plans loosely and try to be okay with them changing on the fly.

Most people don’t go travelling all that often. For those people, it’s probably worth prioritising the travel and one-off experiences over your regular fitness. You can make up for a missed exercise, but the memories from travelling aren’t easily replaced.

The flip side of this is that you need to not be so flexible that you don’t do anything at all. We suggest making a list of your general weekly goals, as well as keeping track of what you are doing to keep fit while travelling. For example, you could have a memo on your phone (or laptop, notebook, or even secret spy code) showing that you’re hoping to exercise three times per week while travelling. Then, at the end of the first week, you can look at the memo and see what you’ve actually done. If you’ve exercised two or three times, you’re on track! Congratulations! But if you’ve only exercised once or not at all, maybe you need to think a bit more carefully about how you’ll achieve your goals in the next week.

We think this treads the delicate balance between being kind to yourself and holding yourself accountable for your own actions and meeting your targets.

Fitness should be a part of your travelling, and you can add to it in interesting and exciting ways.

It’s not great if you have to think of your exercise time as time lost from your travel and new experiences in a different place, so look at changing this mindset.

Where possible, you should look to incorporate fitness into part of your transport while travelling. Could you walk, hike, or cycle to get around the area you’re visiting? This could be how you’re getting between places for a day trip, or, if you’re feeling more ambitious, you could base a whole holiday around your travel method. If you decide to walk part of the Appalachian trail, we think that covers your fitness requirements! But so does cycling around Central Park in New York after summer camp.

Walking or cycling is a brilliant way to get to know an unfamiliar place better. If you’re in a bus or taxi, it’s easy to fall asleep, stare at your phone, or just zone out. If you have to navigate yourself, you’ll pay more attention to everything between your start and endpoint! If you’re heading to summer camp, you’ll undoubtedly find that your steps are in the tens of thousands as you trek between activities, meals, and programmes.

There are almost endless possibilities of accidental adventures you could stumble along in the “in-between” moments of your travelling.

Finally, take advantage of what’s on your doorstep when travelling.

If you’re camping in the middle of a national park, you probably won’t have access to a rowing machine. But you will have brilliant hiking trails and running routes available. If you’re at summer camp, you may not have a huge gym, but you’ll have enough equipment to complete a full-body workout. Adapting to circumstance is the biggest bit of advice we can offer because this is the only way to really keep fit while travelling through any possible terrain or location.

Again, this can actually be a massive benefit to your travelling as well as helping to improve your fitness. If you’re in a new city and they offer some type of fitness activity you’ve never done before, give it a go. Budget allowing, there are countless weird and wacky sports on offer worldwide that you could go and do as a one-off. Who knows, you might find your new favourite hobby?

This is also a brilliant way to make friends and meet people while travelling since people are usually excited to talk about hobbies they care about.

We hope this guide has been helpful and that you’ll find a way to keep fit while travelling. Overall, try not to be too rigid about the whole thing, but remember to hold yourself accountable, too.

Fitness and travelling can go hand in hand, and if you’re able to find the perfect balance, then a trip of a lifetime is just a short walk away.