How to Strength Train On the Road
For those of you who are keeping up to date with our posts, emails and/or IG, you are probably sick of hearing us talk about two things:
Our adventures in South East Asia
Using a structured programme with progressive overload to monitor and increase your strength over time.
However, amongst our antics in Malaysia, our 4 weeks back in Bondi and now our 1 month travelling Vietnam our strength training has not been what you would call ‘optimal’.
Malaysia was 10 days and 2 different hotel gyms. Both had good equipment available but, nonetheless, it was different to the equipment we were used to back at our outdoor gym in Bondi. Then, we were back on Bondi Beach with our go-to equipment, but it was just for 4 weeks and now we are in Vietnam jumping from one Airbnb to the next equipped with just a few resistance bands and a desire to keep up our training while we travel. All of this means no real structure to our training and an increased difficulty in ensuring progressive overload.
It has to be said, Cyan is like a Chameleon, effortlessly adapting her strength training to her environment. It’s me who struggles with the departure from the consistent routine of a strength training programme that I have built - and put in a spreadsheet - based on the equipment at the Bondi Beach outdoor gym. So, like a Butterfly emerging from it’s chrysalis (let’s see how many animal analogies I can squeeze into this article), in the last few months I have had to evolve into a structureless training master, who can still gain strength or, at the very least, maintain the strength I had built pre-jumping around the world. I am going to share the three tips that allow me to do this.
Tip 1: Keep It Short
Whether you are relaxing on holiday, travelling or on the road for work, strength training isn’t going to be your priority. It will already feel like an add-on that is slightly in the way of whatever your main event(s) happen to be for that day.
So, don’t turn strength training into even more of a nuisance by thinking you have to do an hours’ workout to not lose all of the hard work you have put in before this trip. Just 20 minutes, 2-5 times a week will be enough to maintain and arguably improve your health and fitness. Not only this, keeping things short and sweet means that it can be sandwiched into the rest of the activities on your itinerary without it becoming a burden or forcing you to sacrifice other plans.
As you know, we advocate for this length of time for your workouts even when you are at home in your normal routine. It makes it less of a battle to fit into the rest of your life, it’s less daunting to complete and as soon as you start the workout, you are almost done! There’s no reason to change this just because you are away from home
Tip 2: Squat, Hinge, Push, Pull
If you aren’t following a structured programme while you are away, a really simple formula to help overcome that decision paralysis and create a workout for yourself is to include one exercises from each of the Squat, Hinge, Push and Pull movement pattern categories.
For example, I could do a Lateral Lunge (Squat) superset with a Banded Romanian Deadlift (Hinge) for 2-3 sets, followed by Pushups (Push) superset with a Banded Row (Pull) for 2-3 sets. I would make sure to take all my sets to about an 8 out of 10 level of challenge to help me maintain or even gain strength. Hey Presto, you have created and completed your workout!
You could then repeat this workout for simplicity or use the same formula to create a different one, next time you exercise while you are away.
Tip 3: Do IT Early
This is advice I have now learnt after doing the opposite. For the first few days of our trip in Hanoi, we left our workouts until the evening (6:30pm). Back at home, I usually like to save my workouts until around this time as a nice way to cap off a day of work and unwind. However, while we are travelling, as soon as we are done with work we want to go out and explore and the workout just becomes an annoying obstacle that is then rushed, resented or done in a half-assed manner.
But, this isn’t actually the workout being ‘annoying’, is it!? It’s my choice of time that is the annoying part.
So, I shifted my workouts to the morning, 3 days into our trip and it works so much better!
It’s of course a great way to start the day both mentally and physically, but it’s then also done and out the way before you have even tucked into the local delicacies for breakfast! This means that you have free time in the day to do what you actually want to do all while feeling proud that you completed your workout and that you are reaping the rewards of your strength training!
If I think of any more tips, I will be sure to pass them on. But for now, I think these three will put you in a pretty good position for the next time you are on the road and want to keep up with your strength training.
Matt x
