[ 🏃🏽♂️ ] How can I stay fit on vacation without a gym?
[ 🏃🏽♂️ ] How can I stay fit on vacation without a gym?
Two paths to getting your training in & getting back to the fun
On (most) Mondays, we revisit one of the listener questions we’ve answered in a previous episode. It’s been edited for clarity & brevity here. To get a question into the queue, head here.Question:
from Emil:
I'm a 38-year-old man who’s planning to travel from Sweden to Italy for four weeks on vacation with my family.
It will be an awesome time, but I want to get in 30-45 minutes of fitness every day between the pasta and wine.
Does Ben have any go-to training when on the road? Running and bodyweight? I will not be going to any gym.
Answer:
BEN: If you're not gonna be going to a gym, it’s fairly limited, and you just nailed it, Emil. It's going to be running and body weight.
In terms of body weight movements, you have upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hinge patterns, and squat patterns. So, just give some examples of what those would be.
Upper-body pushing would be something like push-ups.
Upper body pulling would be something like pull-ups.
A squat pattern would be like air squats.
And a pull pattern would be something like deadlifts.
So, the secret sauce to doing this effectively in 30 or 45 minutes each day starts with choosing one of two paths.
The first one is that on any given day, you lean into a certain movement pattern, and then you don't touch it for another couple of days.
Let’s say you want to do 200 push-ups on Monday. You do something like 10 rounds of a 200-meter run, 10 pushups, and 10 sit-ups.
So, you’re going to do a bunch of push-ups, but then we’re not going to tax that same kind of upper-body pushing for 48 or 72 hours. Basically, when you’re no longer sore to the touch, you know you’re okay to revisit push-ups again.
The second path you could take is to turn every day into a total-body day. You could do something like an AMRAP30 of 10 pushups, 20 squats, 30 sit-ups, and a 400-meter run.
Great, big, total body workout.
The next day, because you didn’t overtax any of those specific movement patterns or body parts, you can do something similar. Maybe you do five push-ups, ten squats, and 15 sit-ups and then run for 5:00. When you come back from the run, you double the reps of push-ups, squats, and sit-ups. You do the run again, come back, and double the reps again.
So, those are broadly the two approaches Emil can take.
PATRICK: A couple of little practical questions I can imagine Emil asking.
First, he says he has 30 to 45 minutes a day and wants to work out every day. Let's assume that's just most days since he’s on vacation, and there are likely to be at least a couple of days when he can’t fit training in.
Does he take 45 minutes every single time? You know, a bit of a warm-up, a bit of a cool-down, but basically, the workout always lasts 35ish minutes?
Or is there value in varying the time domain to play with intensity?
BEN: For a month, I’d tell him to do whatever he wants.
For a lifetime, yes, totally. If I have somebody for a year, we're not gonna do 40-minute workouts every day. But for being on vacation, we know how this goes.
He’s not going to want to spend a lot of time warming up. He’s going to want to do more volume because he doesn't have weights.
He’ll just have to be mindful of rep schemes and movements. He won’t do 45 minutes of jumping lunges or pull-ups, for example.
So he’s just got to find the right balance between movement selection, movement patterns, and reps.
PATRICK: Second practical question, and this obviously varies by the person, but would you recommend he have a plan laid out in advance? Or does he just show up and say, “Cool, this is the 30 minutes I've got, what do I feel like doing?”
BEN: Yeah, that speaks more to personality traits than it does to the actual efficacy of training. If it were me, there's no way I'd plan things out ahead of time.
I'm going to wake up in the morning and go, “What do I feel like doing?”
PATRICK: Cool. I would too.
BEN: But, yeah, there are other people who need to figure it out, who are going to lay it all out to make sure they're getting all the body parts split in equal fashion.
So it’s really a personality thing. It matters less in terms of creating a more potent program for 4 weeks of vacation.
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I am currently on vacation doing more or less exactly this. I'm happy to see that my intuition about how to approach this was right. Of course, I had this intuition because I've been listening to Chasing Excellence for a few years now (and maybe even heard this segment already).