One of the most frustrating things for a psyched athlete is a disturbance of the training routine. It’s part of the reason that injuries, illnesses, and even recovery weeks are so crushing. Most of the people I end up working with are in the really driven camp already, or they’d probably not worry about coaching. When my athletes hit the road, then, there are a ton of questions about what to do, how to keep from losing fitness, and how long it is “safe” to be out of the routine.
There are a couple of ways to look at this, and the overall message to athletes is to “chill out,” which doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence from these highly-driven people.
The important thing to remember is that pure strength and power decline only slightly in the first couple of weeks after stopping training. A week at the beach? Don’t worry about it. Two weeks hiking in the mountains? No big deal. Only after 3-4 weeks do we start to see a notable decline. Any strength activity done during this time can help mitigate this reduction in force, so a bodyweight workout in grandma’s basement, a hotel gym session, or even just a trip to climb some fun boulder at a gym can be really helpful.
Aerobic fitness reductions are a bit more rapid. One of the issues with having a high level of endurance is that there are a hole host of factors that need to change in order to keep fit. Although many athletes run or ride or ski every day out of compulsion, there is also a physiological aspect to it. Some aspects of aerobic fitness can start to decline in less than 24 hours!
All is not lost, though. Even if you can’t get on your bike or in a pool, your sport-specific endurance losses can be mitigated by endurance work in another type of activity. Sure, you’d do best to ski if skiing is your sport, but then next best thing is to do something.
A massive trap that catches the majority of athletes I’ve talked to is the feeling that they need to exactly replicate their at-home training, and it derails them if they can’t make it happen. As an antidote to this, I suggest having a set of “road rules” that shape our planning. My own rules are as follows:
Do something every day, even if it is just a walk.
Make use of hotel gyms, climbing gym weight rooms, or even an empty floor. Leverage these constraints to be creative.
Understand that anything shorter than a two-week trip should show no decline in physical potential.
Be grateful for the opportunity rather than resentful of the inconvenience.
Assuming you’re a climber, any travel to a different climbing area or gym should be celebrated. Don’t just go in the gym and try to do your block pulls and foam rolling, but make use of what they have to offer. Climb some gym routes. Do one of the boulder circuits. Check out a different training board than you’re used to. Some of my most-fun sessions have been just playing around in gyms wherever I travel.
I think hotel gyms are wonderful opportunities to learn and be creative. Most of them have a set of dumbbells and a bench, so I love to do things like a descending circuit:
Lunges 10-9-8-…-2-1
Push-Ups 10-9-8-…-2-1
Front Squat 10-9-8-…-2-1
Renegade Rows 10-9-8-…-2-1
I’m also a fan of timed sets, where I do, say, three reps of an exercise each minute for ten minutes. I then usually pick a second exercise, do the same, and am out of the gym in 20 minutes.
Or how about some 3-7s? In this one, you’d pick a weight that you could do for about 12 reps, but start out by doing just 3. Then you rest 15 seconds, do 4 reps with the same weight, rest 15 more seconds, do 5 reps. Repeat the same rest, then do 6 reps, repeat the rest for 15 more seconds, and then do 7. After you’ve completed this upward ladder, you then rest for 2 minutes and 30 seconds before repeating it again 2 more times. This takes maybe 10 minutes, and you could do it with two different exercises. This is more aimed at muscular hypertrophy, but you’ll definitely feel like you did something! If you’ve never done a workout structure like this, I would advise doing something that uses fewer muscles the first couple of times, such as bicep curls, rather than pull-ups.
Outside of the gym, I am not a huge fan of trying to hit time or distance when we are on a vacation. What I do think is valuable is to try to spend some time walking around the area where you are visiting and getting to know it a bit differently than you would if you’re just riding in an Uber. Nothing wrong with going for a run or riding a bike, but simply going for a walk is usually the lowest-hanging fruit and is available to all of us.
Activity is super helpful when it comes to maintaining our fitness. The mistake some of us make is to just do nothing on vacation, and then, when we come back, we feel the effects of sloth.
For those of us that are actively headed toward a fitness goal or just want to stay strong, simply alternating days between taking a walk and then doing some kind of strength-ish routine in a weight room is fine. If you’re a climber and you get to climb a couple of times on your trip, that is a huge win.
Stay away from the obsession level mindset when you hit the road (I must find a Moon Board 2016!), and you are probably going to be a lot better off when you are taken out of your normal routine.