11 Essential Tips to Stay Healthy and Fit While Traveling

As the holiday season approaches, you may be one of those people who looks at the two months of intermittent vacation time on your calendar with a combination of excitement and dread.

On the one hand, you know that you’re going to enjoy a nice break from the rigors of your daily life. On the other hand, you know that you’ve always had tremendous difficulty staying fit while traveling, and you abhor the thought of staring into the mirror at the conclusion of two weeks of endless eating and zero workouts, and conceding that your body shape has noticeably changed.

Learning how to stay fit while traveling can be an invaluable arsenal of knowledge, because it can prevent you from falling victim to the pitfalls that quite frankly derail most people when they leave their familiar surroundings, start eating foods that they shouldn’t, and neglect to engage in their regular workouts. 

With this in mind, here are a few tips that can help you stay fit while you travel. All of these tips are helpful, but even if you engage in only a handful of them, it can be the difference between requiring just one or two workouts to touch up your muscle strength, and needing an extra month to shed the five new pounds of body fat you’ve added to your midsection.

Tip #1: Master the Art of Staying Fit Without Equipment

No matter how much your home gym equipment costs, or no matter how much is charged to your credit card to cover your monthly gym membership, the floor of the room you’re in is always free, and this includes the limited space offered by your hotel room.

At a minimum, this means that ground-based exercises like push-ups, crunches, and mountain climbers are always going to be at your disposal, along with entire yoga routines. If you have enough space to stand upright, free squats, bodyweight lunges, and burpees are also easy training options.

Moreover, if you want to add a cardiovascular element to your workout without leaving the room, simple tricks like running in place and  jumping jacks can easily help you to elevate your heart rate and burn some additional calories without relying on additional training equipment. 

As usual, if you’re truly wondering how to stay fit and even lose weight while traveling, looking for opportunities to actively explore new spaces while in motion is always a solid suggestion. This means you should get out and see the world around you, and one of the healthiest and most immersive ways to do that is by walking from place to place as you sightsee in  your new environment. 

What’s more, if you happen to be a runner, having new scenery unveiled before you as you jog through a new city is just another added bonus to being on vacation.

Tip #2: Learn to Strength Train with Travel Friendly Tools

While the inability to visit a gym may prevent you from engaging in your exact workout routine, you may be able to get fairly close to recreating the challenge of your everyday workout through the assistance of a few tiny tools that you can slip into your gym bag or travel bag.

For instance, resistance bands are relatively weightless, but they can be used to upgrade the challenge of several of the exercises already listed, while turning your hotel room into a respectable site for strength training.

Resistance bands are a classic tool that 19th-century strongmen once used to increase the intensity of their push-ups long before the bench press was invented, and it  became one of the gold standards for chest exercises, along with bodyweight dips.

Aside from this, elastic bands can be used to replicate a chest press, standing row, overhead press, and bicep curl without much difficulty, and they can also add resistance to your squats and stationary lunges. 

In addition to using  travel-sized tools to boost the difficulty of your movements, you can also use them to increase your comfort. As just one example of this, a travel sized yoga mat can effortlessly enhance the comfort of all of your floor-based exercises.

Tip #3: Plan Healthy Snacks and Meals Ahead of Time

One statement that’s commonly uttered  is that you can’t out train a bad diet, so you always need to make sure what enters your body nourishes your muscle tissue and minimizes your accumulation of body fat while you’re away from home.

Another thing that’s commonly said is that great abs are made in the kitchen, and it’s when you don’t even have a kitchen at your disposal to craft healthy meals that things can truly fall apart on you.

Being outside of the comfort of your home — and the disciplined environment you’ve crafted to keep yourself on the straight and narrow — leaves you at the mercy of convenience stores that serve sugary drinks, and meal after meal served by restaurants that entice you to deviate from your strict diet. 

In no time at all, you can find yourself eating food that’s so high in calories that you end up consuming your daily calorie count over the course of  a single meal, and with several diet-destroying meals still on the agenda. 

One way to ensure that you eat healthy is to plan each meal ahead of time, and both pack and plan accordingly. This might mean you pack your packets of Overnight Oats ahead of time, and then immediately purchase a gallon of milk to keep in your hotel refrigerator. 

It may also mean that you divide your supplements into daily doses and pack them in your luggage so that what you eat from moment to moment is as close to what you would consume if you were still at home as you can make it. 

The point is that there’s no reason why your decision to travel should automatically require you to devolve into a victim of a bad diet who is at the mercy of whatever crappy food is served up by the fast food restaurants within a short drive from your hotel.

Tip #4: Stay Hydrated, Especially During Air Travel

Before your next flight out of town, make sure you drink plenty of fluids. Please don’t misunderstand the directive; this isn’t an encouragement to drink a lot of liquid calories. Instead, it’s a suggestion that you should drink water or other hydrating beverages. 

First of all, it’s essentially impossible to stay fit while traveling if you’re not drinking enough water. This is because the efficiency and functionality of your body declines dramatically if it isn’t adequately hydrated.

In particular, the air pressure and low humidity in air cabins will cause your body to dehydrate during air travel. In just one example, participants in a travel-based study experienced dips in their skin hydration levels by up to 37 percent within two hours of takeoff. (1)

Obviously this is uncomfortable, but that’s only part of the story,  because your habits can dictate a lot of your hydration practices.

You may instinctively hydrate yourself at home because you’re accustomed to habitually getting water from your filtering water pitcher, along with all of the drinks you’ve stocked in your refrigerator, and the water filter in your office break room. 

With all of these options and opportunities eliminated, it’s possible for you to operate in a state of chronic hydration during your travels without even realizing it. 

That’s why you need to be extra certain that you’re addressing your hydration needs. This may require you to pack a hydration supplement if you routinely suffer from dehydration, or suffer from a dehydration-inducing illness.

Tip #5: Prioritize Sleep and Recovery

Depending on how you do your travel planning and where you choose to concentrate your efforts, you can stack the deck against yourself in terms of staying fit during your time away from home.

This isn’t to say there aren’t ways to fill your vacation with healthful activities, like a walking tour, a kayaking excursion, a hiking expedition through the outskirts of a new city, or even a marathon dancing session at a local nightclub.

However, If you’re building your travel experience around entertainment, like checking out the night life in a foreign city, or partying deep into the morning, it’s going to be quite challenging to maintain your regular sleep schedule, followed by your familiar morning routine.

Sleep deprivation has been proven in studies to downgrade physical measurements like vigor, accuracy, reaction time, strength, and endurance. It has also been shown to compromise judgment and decision-making abilities as well. (2)

While it’s okay to have the occasional night of excessive fun, it’s crucial to provide your body with adequate rest and recovery in the aftermath of your enjoyment. 

Even if you’re staying physically active during your partying — which is a good thing — this still means you need to be getting sufficient sleep throughout your travels, and also consuming your standard protein and other supplements that enhance your body’s recovery functions.

Tip #6: Manage Stress and Stay Balanced

During your travels, it’s also important to focus on your mental health as well. This is because you can find yourself outside of your normal routine, and if you are a creature of habit, a change of environment and reduced access to your familiar surroundings can throw everything you do completely out of whack.

To preserve your mental health while traveling, it is helpful to train daily, and try to adhere to your customary fitness routine as closely as you can. 

Studies show that exercise can go a long way toward boosting mental health and self-esteem, with this being  especially true of aerobic exercise. (3)

Aside from exercise, eating the right combination of foods can also help your brain to stay in shape, as vitamins, minerals, and certain supplements have the added benefit of alleviating much of the oxidative stress felt by your brain.

Tip #7: Keep Your Immune System Strong

If you’re wondering how  to stay fit while traveling, it’s essential that you take steps  to maintain your general health. This means you’ll need to do everything within your power to ward off illnesses.

This is no small feat, as your travel experiences will be fraught with opportunities to encounter germs. When you sit aboard a plane, you're trapped within a confined space with the air being recirculated throughout the cabin. As a result, you may feel as if you’re simultaneously being exposed to every airborne illness in the world.

Even if you’re taking long road trips by car, you won’t be spared from exposure to germs. You’ll still need to worry about restrooms, restaurants, and other public spaces in which you can’t account for the physical states of most of the people who engage with them.

Fortunately, the way to keep your immune system strong is through making a concerted effort to follow several of the tips that have already been mentioned. 

Specifically, you’ll need to engage in a respectable amount of exercise, get adequate sleep each night, and maintain healthy eating habits that support your immune system. This includes eating foods that are high in vitamin C, or taking supplements containing vitamin C..

Tip #8: Supplement with Joint Support for Active Travel

If you’re the adventurous sort of traveler whose natural activities equate with workouts, you may have no problem whatsoever keeping your calories within a manageable range even if you’re inclined to eat more food on your vacation that you do during your normal life.

All the same, if your travel schedule is filled with endless activities that involve walking, hiking, kayaking, or some other type of self-propelled sightseeing  as you explore diverse landscapes, your muscles and joints are likely to be aching severely at the end of each day. 

Moreover, if you’re stringing together consecutive days of these sorts of activities, your particular brand of fun may end up wreaking havoc on your joints, and leaving you in considerable pain.

In addition to  heeding the advice to rest and sleep so that you can replenish your muscles and give your joints a break, you are also advised to eat foods that are high in the vitamins and minerals that improve joint integrity. 

These include calcium, vitamin D, vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids, along with the sort of antioxidants that are abundant in fruits and vegetables. There are also study results indicating that there are at least 13 supplemental ingredients that can help to provide short- or long-term relief from joint pain. (4)

As always, if you’re having difficulty acquiring these micronutrients through the sources of food that have worked their way onto your regular eating schedule, you can acquire them through supplements without eating food. That way, you can preserve the integrity of your joints without making a special effort to focus on it.

Tip #9: Maintain Energy Levels Throughout the Day

One of the easiest ways to stay fit while traveling is to make sure you’re getting a consistent supply of calories into your body that can fuel your energy output. 

While many travel itineraries cause people to struggle to limit their portions and ingest fewer calories throughout each day, scheduling your days around events that prompt you to remain in constant motion — like walking, hiking, or rowing — can leave you feeling enervated. 

One of the hidden dangers of scenarios like this is that these activities may not even register in your brain as exercise. 

If your concept of a workout is an activity that takes place in a gym over the course of a one-hour block, you may not consider a day-long walking tour to be exercise, even though it’s keeping you on your feet for hours longer than you’re accustomed to.

Realistically, there’s more to exercise than simply structured running sessions and resistance training, and if your cardiovascular system isn’t accustomed to daily, multi-hour sessions of exertion, regardless of their intensity level, you may be completely unfamiliar with how to sustain your body outside of a guided workout setting.

In situations like this, when your days essentially consist of one ceaseless workout after another, you need to eat at regular intervals to preserve your vitality, and to ensure that you won’t crash and burn in the middle of a trail, lake, or mountain. 

This means that you should  eat prior to beginning your daily workout-level activities, that you should also  eat at regular intervals throughout your engagements, and that you should ultimately eat shortly after the conclusion of your daily activities so that you don’t have an alarming crash prior to any nighttime leisure activities you have lined up.

Tip #10: Be Flexible With Your Activities

If you’re participating in a time-dependent fitness program or dieting program — like  an intermittent fasting program — you might think that being ripped away from your environment means you need to throw everything away. This can be especially true if you feel like your schedule is being irreparably tampered with.

While your travel plans may not provide you with a perfect opportunity to sustain your diet and exercise program exactly it’s presently configured, there will still be opportunities to maintain your schedule in one form or fashion.

When it comes to your plans for eating, this may just mean you need to shift your intermittent fasting window to a different block of time. With your workout routine, you may need to do the best you can with what’s available.  

As an example of this, you may realize that If you’ve been involved in heavy strength training for months on end, a week of high-repetition calisthenics might actually do your body some good.

Tip #11: Mentally Bundle These Tips Together

Instead of thinking of these tips as separate entities that you can use to maintain your fitness, it can be helpful to think of them collectively. If you manage to do this, you can effectively address several fitness concerns simultaneously without having to plan for each one individually.

Maintain A Healthy Diet

If you decide to remain cognizant of what you’re eating in all travel situations, many of your general dietary concerns will be addressed. 

To put it another way, if you consistently eat healthy food and drink low-calorie liquid at regular intervals, that should help you to accomplish your fitness goals on the road whether the objective is to lose body fat, fuel your daily exercise, maintain an optimal level of hydration, or help your body to recover

Meanwhile, all of these nutrition-focused actions will have the collective benefit of enabling you to sustain your mental fitness throughout your travels

Treat Every Activity as a Workout

Whether you’re going to be spending a large portion of your day walking around the streets, or a zoo, or even a mall, or you’re going to be involved in a more strenuous form of activity, it would be a good idea for you to conceptualize your activity as exercise.

Once you define your activity as exercise, this means that you can take all of the required steps to prepare for it as if you were preparing for a workout. This may mean that you adorn yourself in the proper attire, bring along a water bottle, consume caffeine for additional energy, or possibly even mix together a pre-workout supplement ahead of time. 

Treat Every Post-Activity Period as a Rest and Recovery Session

If you recognize what you’re doing during your travels could qualify as fitness activities, that means you should conduct yourself in the aftermath of those activities the same way you would if you’d engaged in any other sort of fitness affair.

In other words, if your muscles require replenishment, you should be sure to consume plenty of protein so that they can recover from everything you’ve put them through. On top of that, you should consume plenty of water, and continue with your normal round of supplementation, especially if it includes creatine, which requires daily maintenance doses.

Conclusion: Stick to Your Plan and Stay Flexible

While it’s true that there are plenty of ways that traveling can interfere with your grand fitness plans, this doesn’t need to be the case. In reality, there’s almost no situation you’ll encounter during your travels during which you’ll be absolutely forced to make a poor nutrition decision, or to ignore exercise opportunities completely.

If you’re creative, there will be plenty of opportunities for your travels to be both fun and fitness-friendly. Who knows? If you approach traveling with a little bit of strategic forethought, staying active during your travels might even serve to spice up your fitness routine instead of derailing it.

References:

1. Guéhenneux S, Gardinier S, Morizot F, Le Fur I, Tschachler E. Skin surface hydration decreases rapidly during long distance flights. Skin Res Technol. 2012 May;18(2):238-40. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0846.2011.00560.x. Epub 2011 Oct 18. PMID: 22092950.

2. Vitale KC, Owens R, Hopkins SR, Malhotra A. Sleep Hygiene for Optimizing Recovery in Athletes: Review and Recommendations. Int J Sports Med. 2019 Aug;40(8):535-543. doi: 10.1055/a-0905-3103. Epub 2019 Jul 9. PMID: 31288293; PMCID: PMC6988893.

3. Gilani SRM, Feizabad AK. The effects of aerobic exercise training on mental health and self-esteem of type 2 diabetes mellitus patients. Health Psychol Res. 2019 Mar 11;7(1):6576. doi: 10.4081/hpr.2019.6576. PMID: 30997432; PMCID: PMC6441819.

4. Liu X, Machado GC, Eyles JP, Ravi V, Hunter DJ. Dietary supplements for treating osteoarthritis: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Sports Med. 2018 Feb;52(3):167-175. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2016-097333. Epub 2017 Oct 10. PMID: 29018060.