Staying in shape during long-term travel can be a real challenge. If you’re a digital nomad like me you’ll find yourself constantly outside of your routine and somewhere that you don’t have access to your normal gym or equipment. Plus, when you’re traveling you’ll want to spend as much time as you can out exploring and visiting the destination that you’re in which makes finding the motivation to exercise while traveling even more difficult.

Similarly, this global coronavirus pandemic has thrown us out of our routine and taken away our access to a gym or equipment. Thankfully, we have years of experience at this and wanted to take a second to share our tips with you.

When in these situations it’s easy to understand why working out can fall to the wayside. There just seem to be more important or more interesting things to do and the motivation just isn’t there. Here are some things to remember.

Why is it important to keep up your workout routine?

During travel, you often get exposed to a whole host of new bacteria that could cause sickness. Working out while traveling can help reduce your risks and help you stay healthy while traveling. Besides the general benefits of regular exercise, (like reducing the risk of disease, improving mental health, helping manage blood sugar and insulin level and controlling body weight) a workout routine for traveling or this quarantine has some unique benefits.

Create a buffer against sickness. Moderate workouts can help flush bacteria out of the lungs and airways helping prevent airborne sickness (like the flu and coronavirus). Breathing heavily and getting your heart rate up gets all of the fluids in your body moving, delivers fresh blood and fresh oxygen to your cells and helps expedite the process of getting the waste out of your body.
Workout routine also helps in the production of more white blood cells. White blood cells are your body's bacteria and sickness fighters. More white blood cells means you’re less likely to get sick in the first place, and if you do end up sick, it can help decrease the length of the severity of your sickness.
Moderate exercise produces endorphins in our body and helps our bodies maintain the delicate balance of hormones. This can make exercise an essential part of reducing the stress and anxiety around travel or quarantine. It can help us keep our sanity and settle back into ourselves.

Working out while traveling can be especially helpful to aid in overcoming jet lag. A quick workout can wake up our system when we are struggling to get out of bed, or help us get out some energy and quiet our mind so that we can sleep when our circadian rhythm might not be ready for bed.
We’ve also found that when on our travels we like to, well, indulge in the local food. When we’ve neglected to keep up with our workouts it inevitably means we come home with at least a few extra pounds. This isn’t a problem when we’re only traveling for a few weeks, but can spiral when we’re on our much longer 2-6 months trips.

Similarly, we’ve found that our access to clean, fresh foods has been severely diminished during quarantine and we’ve been eating a lot more frozen pizzas… With our diet a little off, it’s really important that we stick to our travel workout routine.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of tips and advice to help keep your workout and health routine on track.

Make Exercise Part of the Trip

1.Plan the time for workouts

As part of your planning, outline areas in your itinerary when you have free time, or intentionally plan in free time within your itinerary. Plan to use part of this time to keep up your routine. Specificity is key here. So plan the location, time of day, and length of the workout ahead. This makes it easier to stick to the plan.

2. Try and figure out ways to incorporate exercise into your travel itinerary

Plan a hike through a nearby attraction, take the walking tour instead of a bus tour, book an adventurous excursion like kayaking, etc. When in Spain, we planned an entire day in Costa Brava hiking, kayaking and cliff jumping as our exercise. In Terceira, we spent a morning hiking the coastline and then the afternoon canyoning a river down from the center of the island. Incorporating exercise into the way that you see or experience places can make it easy to commit to getting in a workout. The exercise becomes part of what you came to the destination for!

3. Don’t rely on making the workouts up when you’re traveling

Write your workouts, save some workouts in your phone, or subscribe to an online workout program before you even leave. This will prevent you from having to plan it in the moment and will lower the mental energy you’ll need to motivate yourself to workout while traveling, jet-lagged or tired from sightseeing. Prewriting our workouts has been especially helpful for us during quarantine as we are usually doing a workout written by our gym. Here are some free/cheap at-home workout programs that you can check out: Fitness Blender, Yoga with Adriene (these 2 are free), Fiit and WOD at Home.

Make obtainable goals and don’t overcommit

If you set lofty goals and aren’t able to sustain them in the beginning, it can be really easy to just give up, especially given the circumstances. If you usually work out every day for an hour until you’re exhausted, dial it back to 80 or 90 percent, or only workout for half an hour, so that you still have the energy to spend time exploring! Don’t think that just because you’re on vacation (or in quarantine), you’re going to spend more time working out. Also, remember that life happens; don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day here or there.

4. Try to replicate and build off of what you would do in your normal routine

If you usually workout in the morning, try to wake up and get a quick workout in before you go exploring (or starting work if you’re quarantined!). If you typically do yoga some days, and HIIT other days, try and stick to this so you’re not fighting your body’s natural rhythm.

5. Do a workout as soon as you get to your accommodations!

This is usually a time that people spend “relaxing” and “settling in,” but this can often lead the body to feel more jet-lagged and tired after travel. Plus, getting a workout in right away sets the tone for your trip and breaks the ice on working out in the space. It’s the perfect jumpstart for your mind and the perfect way to get your body back in rhythm after traveling.

6. Don’t let a lack of equipment discourage you

Even if you’re used to having lots of machines or weights, you can still get a good workout without equipment! Plyometrics, calisthenics and gymnastics as well as numerous activities such as walking, running, and biking are available no matter where you are in the world. If you don’t have any equipment at home, don’t sweat it! You can get creative with books, couches, and chairs. These things are great for lifting, stepping or jumping up on to, or even putting your body in the right position.

For example, books make great substitutes for dumbbells, couches make great step-up platforms, and chairs make for a great place to do bodyweight dips. To that end, if you want to stock your house up for quick and easy at-home workouts, all you really need is a set of moderate weight dumbbells, a set of TRX straps, and maybe a few resistance bands.

Working out During Quarantine

Lastly, this quarantine has challenged us all in new and unique ways and a ton of organizations in the fitness industry have risen to the challenge.

Lots of gyms are offering free, online programming so there are lots of workouts out there to follow along with. Many of these are live streaming workouts on IG Live or FB Live. This can help give you a definite time and plan for your workout, plus the added motivation of having a coach and community there with you. Peruse IG or Facebook to find tons of programs available right now.

Speaking of community, coordinate Zoom workouts with your friends or get them involved in a workout challenge. Having good influences and others holding you accountable can really help improve your success.

Good luck to everyone. Stay active, stay healthy and stay safe. If you have tips of your own for working out while traveling or during quarantine, we’d love to hear them!

Author Bio:

Stephen Gary is the co-founder of Flashpacker Co, a lifestyle brand aimed at helping the growing number of global flashpackers get the most out of their adventures. He is a Crossfit Level 1 coach and also provides personal one on one coaching. He’s been a digital nomad for the past 5 years traveling all across the globe while running several businesses. You can read more of his writing over on the Flashpacker Co website or on Instagram @FlashpackerCo.

All images provided in this article are property of Stephen Gary and Flashpacker Co.