Log in Subscribe
Moving Towards Health

How to workout on vacation, or not

Maggi Fitzpatrick
Posted 8/16/22

As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This is certainly true when it comes to exercising on vacation. We usually have great intentions of …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in
Moving Towards Health

How to workout on vacation, or not

Posted

As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This is certainly true when it comes to exercising on vacation. We usually have great intentions of getting our workouts in while we’re away, but our trips don’t always go as planned. And oftentimes, we don’t get our workouts in as we’d hoped because we didn’t make a plan at all. 

Now to answer your question of whether or not you should work out on vacation: it depends. The first thing you need to do to determine whether or not you should work out on vacation is to reflect on your past experiences with exercise on vacation. What did you like about how you’ve approached exercise in the past? What did you not like? Did your past plan (or lack thereof) make you feel good, or not so good?

Once you have an idea of how you’ve felt in the past, write down your current goals. Can prioritizing exercise on vacation help you achieve a feeling you’re desiring? Do you love to spend your alone time moving your body? Or maybe you don’t have any current physical goals and exercise doesn’t matter to you. 

Let’s say you decide you do want to spend time exercising on vacation. The next step is to determine how much time you’d like to dedicate to this. Do you like to take long walks as a way to decompress? Do you want your workout over quickly to return to spending time with your family? Also, decide whether you’d like this time to be spent alone or with others. 

Now that we’ve answered all of these questions, we can determine what type of equipment we’ll need to achieve our goal. Sometimes when I’m on vacation, I go to a gym if I’m with friends who want to go too. Other times, I spend my time taking a walk in a scenic place. Sometimes I do bodyweight workouts in my room or outside, and sometimes I use the hotel gym. To make this decision, I weigh the pros and cons of spending money to go to a gym, which may take away more time but can be more convenient, to finding free ways to exercise which may take less time but may not help me reach my current goal.

There isn’t a set answer on whether or not you should exercise on vacation and how you should go about it. It fully depends on what you want to spend your time doing and how you’d like to feel. I usually exercise on vacation because it helps my body feel less stiff from all of the traveling, it gives me time to clear my head, and I always feel better after I move my body. I’ll typically do things that are completely different from my training plan to give myself a break from the gym.

I believe it’s important we move our bodies every day, but the way we do that can and should change. Taking breaks from our normal routine can help us recover, spark creativity, and find new things we’d never know we liked if we didn’t try them. 

After you make your plan, give yourself the freedom to allow it to change. We can only move towards our goals if we pave a way to get there, but we will never reach our goals if we cling to how we believe the path should look. Be open to having things go better than you could ever imagine.

If you’d like help planning out your exercise routine on vacation or in your regular schedule, send me an email at maggi@calofitnessllc.com and we can come up with the best plan for you.

Xoxo

Coach Maggi 

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here