Staying Active on the Road: A Few Essential Tips
While you should certainly take time to relax and enjoy yourself when you’re on the road, there is a lot to be said for making the effort to be active. If you’ve been flying, your body needs to recover from the stress of sitting in a cramped position with restricted blood flow and recycled air. If you’re sampling local cuisine, a little exercise can help you burn off some excess calories. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to find a gym and spend an hour lifting weights and doing hard cardio (unless that’s your thing.) Here are some simple tips to stay active while traveling for business or pleasure.
Pack Your Vitamins
Whenever you leave home for an overnight stay, it’s a good idea to pack some essential medicines with your toiletries “just in case.” You may have an unexpected bout of seasonal allergies, a headache, or indigestion from being off your normal diet. When packing your “pharmacopeia,” why not consider adding some healthy vitamins and supplements that you might find in thrive reviews to set your body up for success.
Understand the Power of Walking
If you’re traveling on vacation, here’s some good news: you’re probably already staying as active as you need to be. Chances are, you’re visiting points of interest or sight-seeing, and it’s more than likely that this involves a lot of travel by foot. If that seems insignificant to you, it’s important that you understand just how beneficial walking can be. While there are a few schools of thought on the benefits of running and other more intense cardio routines, experts generally agree that walking is one of the best things a person can do to stay active. Why? Because human beings’ bodies are designed to walk. Walking at a brisk but reasonable pace (where you can comfortably breathe through your nose or carry on a conversation) is a very good workout for your lungs and heart. If you keep your heart-rate around 110 beats per minute, you will also burn more stored fat than you will with a faster-paced run. Runs may burn more energy and calories, but they will burn through foods you have recently eaten, possibly leaving you hungry and doing more harm than good. Walking in an anaerobic heart-rate zone, however, can burn off your reserves. In addition, stretching your legs and back, breathing well, and enjoying fresh air and nature are all powerful benefits of walking while out of town. For accurate detailing, use a pedometer or wearable smart watch to track your steps, pace, and heart-rate.
Download a Workout Program
If you are a fitness enthusiast who likes to stick to a certain workout routine, the road can be challenging. You may waste a lot of time locating and traveling to a hotel gym or neighboring fitness center only to find they don’t have the kind of equipment you want or need. Consider this a chance to try something new but do it without ever leaving your room! Thanks to digital video, you can easily rent or buy a yoga, Pilates, or other workout video and either stream or download it to a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. There are also app-based subscription workout video programs that you can explore. In seconds, you can be set up to start a low-impact but highly beneficial workout in your hotel room and be done in the time it would normally take you to find the gym. A quick word of caution, however: some workout videos feature higher-intensity cardio like kickboxing or jumping. While that may be good for your fitness goals, it’s not conducive to a hotel setting. You may upset your temporary neighbors, which is why it’s best to stick to low impact routines.
Body-Weight Exercise for the Hotel Room
If weightlifting is part of your normal workout routine, it may be hard for you to find an acceptable substitute on the road. While they may not do the trick if you’re an elite athlete training for a competition, body-weight exercises are a great alternative for most people. Many top trainers encourage using your own body weight to strength train. The catch is that you must do it with great technique. Your main body-weight exercises are push-ups, squats, lunges, and sit-ups. These can all be done in a hotel or rental home room without any equipment, but the secret is to do them slowly with great technique, as opposed to sloppily performing a ton of reps. A great plan for road warriors is to perform a “ladder” workout, starting with 10 reps of each exercise, followed by 9, then 8, then 7, and so on. By the time you get to the 1 rep level, you’ll have completed a great body workout that includes cardio as your heart will have to work to keep up!
All it really takes to stay active while traveling is the decision to commit to one of these simple plans. Choose the one that looks best to you and try it on your next trip!
