Traveling can be a source of both excitement and stress! The anticipation of a long awaited trip, or an unexpected family emergency are both reasons for travel and can bring about different emotions. Regardless of the reason, it can be difficult to maintain your normal health routine due to various causes beyond our control.
Nevertheless, with a little added effort and planning ahead, maintaining healthy habits while on the go is possible.
In order to stay on track while traveling, try incorporating some of the following:
Prepare Healthy Snacks
- Let’s face it, when traveling it is so easy to get off track and eat foods that you normally don’t consume simply due to convenience. One way to avoid eating so many unhealthy options is to prep healthier choices ahead of time. You can purchase sandwich/snack bags and pre-portion each snack for quick and easy access.
- Healthier options include:
- Fruits: bananas, oranges, apples (pre-slice and pre-peel oranges)
- Nuts: Almonds, peanuts, pistachios (be sure to pay attention to servings sizes)
- Popcorn: Skinny POP (Low calorie snack with no GMO’s, artificial ingredients, and is gluten free)
- Protein: Premade protein shakes (be sure to check the sugar content) or bring your own protein powder and mix with water.
Eat Something every three to four hours
- This will help to maintain your blood sugar and prevent you from getting extremely hungry. If you go too long without eating it can slow your metabolism and also cause you not to make the best food decisions.
Bring workout clothes and gym shoes
- Obviously, if you don’t have the proper clothes you will not be able to exercise. One way to encourage yourself to stay on your exercise routine is to pack workout clothes and shoes. Bring a few options so you can work out more than once if you will not have the ability to do laundry.
Schedule a specific time to exercise
- I live by my calendar! It helps me to stay on track and remember all of the things I need to get done. Designating a specific time to exercise will help you make sure it gets done. I would recommend getting a workout in first thing in the morning. That way you can make sure it gets done, otherwise you may be too tired to do it at night.
No Gym Access?
- Bring along mobile training equipment that can easily be packed and used to get in a good workout.
- Core Sliders: Maximize working your core and help to improve stability.
- Resistance/Bands/Tubes: Help improve tone and strength. They come in various resistance levels to help you progress!
- Jump Rope: Great for a high intensity interval cardio workout and can also help to tone your legs and arms.
- Stability Ball: Can be used for a full body workout including core, arms, legs and glutes. You can deflate the ball for easy packing and inflate when you arrive to your destination.
- Use your body weight to exercise. The following exercises can give you a full body workout with NO equipment needed!!
- Squats: Work the hips and thighs including the hamstrings, quads and glutes.
- Lunges: Also work the hips and thighs as well as the calf muscles. There are many variations of the lunge including the reverse lunge, side lunge, lateral lunge and the cross-behind lunge.
- Pushups: Work the arms, shoulders, chest, back and abdominals.
- Planks: Work the entire body and specifically targets the core. Trains the muscles to work together as a unit.
- Bridges: Work your glutes, hamstrings and core muscles.
- Walk/Jog/Run: Works the most important muscle, the heart!
Again, it can certainly be hard staying on track while traveling but it is definitely possible with a little effort! Remember anything worth having is worth working for and maintaining your health is unquestionably worth it!!
Find Health in Every Day!!
Dr. Lindsay
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