Holidays and exercise

Going on holiday should be an opportunity to suspend your everyday routine and a chance to recalibrate. Whether it’s a beach vacation or a city break, stepping away from the office and your normal activities is always healthy. But what if you’re trying to maintain a regular exercise regime? The question of whether to exercise on holiday can cause guilt-anxiety if all you really want to do is veg out with a crate of Corona in a pool and only move when you need to return to the fridge. Is that so wrong?

We all need a break from everything once every while, but what we want to discuss is whether you should still train and keep up, at least partially, with your fitness routine.

The topic has been open to discussion for a while now and different experts give radically different positions and explenations. Here we’ll try to summarize them for you so that you can wrap around your head and come up with your own logical conclusion.

Many experts agree that while we may benefit from doing nothing for a while, this doesn’t necessarily include all exercise and it has been proven that suspending completely the fitness routine doesn’t show any clear psychological benefits. This considered, experts suggest to take your trainers with you and make up your mind on the spot.

But this isn’t enough. For many of us, the real struggle is to keep the motivation going while on holiday. This is mainly due to the fact that we feel compelled to train, because we want to look good, we want to be able to eat more than merely veggies. We know it’s important but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a thousand other things we’d rather be doing.

The key is to work out how to turn it from being a chore into a habit that we like doing and that doesn’t weight on us. “Reflect on what it is about working out that floats you boat and remind yourself of those motivations often”, experts recommended. We usually realise that what got us into training has now evolved into a routine of some sort, but it’s essential to remind ourselves about that initial spark, to raise our moral and keep grinding.

This means that if you started with a specific objective in mind, print out reminders, use your social media accounts to provide inspiration. But again, the hardest thing to fight is laziness, getting out of the bed in the first place. To help you do that, experts recommend a pre-scheduling of our activities while on holiday, so that if you’ve planned a few running routes in advance, you’ll feel more committed to keeping it up and you might even find some buddies to meet up with while you’re there. Apps like Strava are perfect for discovering new running routes and, when you’re there, you can use it to track your run before sharing your efforts with followers and friends. After all there’s nothing like a humble brag to motivate yourself.

Then of course different little adaptation can help you. For example, if you’re travelling to somewhere hot, you’ll want to do the jog at the late hours in the afternoon or early in the morning. And don’t forget to pat yourself in the back from time to time. Be satisfied of your consistency and dedication.

Moreover, visualizing you’re objective and what it would mean for you to achieve it, is an important step that you must not forget to do. So close your eyes and feel it, hear it, smell it, breathe it, touch it – the more you visualise being in that situation the better prepared you will be and the more likely you are to succeed.

For more information don’t hesitate to contact us by filling the form on our homepage. We’ll be in touch with you soon to answer all of your doubts. In the meantime don’t forget to check out all of the others post by the Budget Fitness Team.