In my last blog post, Workout Routines: Exercising on Vacation – Part 1, I outlined why I think it’s a good idea for most people to have at least a little structured exercise over the course of a vacation that spans a week or more.  Today, I wanted to use my own vacation workout schedule as an example of how you can stay active without filling up your schedule too much.

First, though, I think it’s important to make two points:

1. There’s a difference between “physical activity” and “exercise” – and it’s fine for a vacation to include a lot more of the former than the latter.  You’ll see below that I didn’t “exercise” every day, but I was very physically active the entire time.  We walked on the beach almost every morning, and during our trip, we did ziplined, swam, rode horses, snorkeled, and hiked.

2. What you do before you leave for vacation is likely as important as what you do during vacation.  I prefer to intentionally “overreach” right before I leave for any extended period of time, as it allows me to essentially “write off” the first few days of travel as recovery (everybody likes to sleep on airplanes and crush awful airport food, right?).

To that end, we flew out on a Saturday morning very early in the morning, so I chalked Saturday up as a travel day.  That meant that Mo-Fr in the week before were training days (MoTh – upper body, TuFr – lower body, We – energy systems work).  Since I knew I wouldn’t really have access to any heavy weights to use for lower body training, I made sure that it was the last thing I did before I left.  Here’s how the rest of the vacation looked (keep in mind that my wife joined me for all these sessions; it wasn’t like I was ditching her on our honeymoon):

Sa: Travel Day (just a walk on the beach that night)
Su: Upper body TRX work consisting of inverted rows, pushups, Ys, Fallouts, External Rotations/Ws, and some curls for the girls (hey, I was pretty much on the beach; don’t judge!)

Mo: Sprinting on the beach (eight sprints of about 80yds).  When the view is this good, you really can’t complain about being out of breath.

Tu: Lower Body TRX work consisting of pistol squats, stir the pot (video below, thanks to Dewey Nielsen), Bulgarian split squats, calf raises, and side bridges

We: Upper body TRX work consisting of (more) inverted rows, flutters, 1-arm row w/reach, and fallout extensions

Th: 2 hours of snorkeling was plenty of physical activity for me

Fr: Another light TRX session, which was just kind of a filler of inverted rows (figured I’d use this week to be proactive with my bum shoulder) and additional core work.  To be very honest, I was pretty sunburned by this point, which is why I kept it short.  Did do some prone reaches (props to Dewey below once again), which is a good exercise to try, if you haven’t seen them before:

Sa: 3 hours hiking in Manuel Antonio National Park.  Not a bad view from the top, huh?

Su: More sprinting on the beach, this time for 12 sprints of about 60yds.

Mo: Travel Day, so not much moving around besides the 2-3 mile walk on the beach that morning

We arrived home at midnight, and I was back to my normal lifting schedule on Tuesday.

As you can see, this wasn’t a ton of training time.  In fact,  I don’t think a single one of these sessions lasted more than 20 minutes, and all of them were done outside in the fresh air and sunshine.  I’m not saying that you have to include this much exercise in your vacations, but I am trying to show that if you are interested in maintaining an active lifestyle even when you travel, that it can be done quite easily and without a ton of time invested. Plus, most of these were body weight training exercises, so you don’t need a lot of equipment to get them done.

Have some vacation exercise strategies of your own?  Please share them in the comment section below.

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