How To Stay Fit While Traveling | Essential Tips For Nomads

Travel is amazing, you get to experience new places, meet new people, learn about different cultures, and see incredible sights. You also eat a lot of new foods and step out of your normal routine, so sometimes you put on a few pounds and start to get out of shape. So how do you stay fit while traveling? Especially for those that travel several months out of the year?

How To Stay Fit While Traveling

Eating Healthy

One of the best ways to stay fit while traveling is to eat healthy while you’re on your trip. Of course you need to try the local cuisine and indulge a bit. That’s all part of the experience. But try to balance that with some healthy meals.

Many popular vacation spots are aware that people want healthier meals and are proving better options. Bali, for example, has many amazing food options. There are a variety of options that are beautiful, delicious, and good for you.

Instead of eating out all the time, cook a few meals at your accommodation. Try to make it healthy. But healthy doesn’t have to be boring. You can have fun learning about new ingredients that may not be available at home. Or, take a cooking class at your destination. Cooking classes are a great way to learn more about the culture you’re visiting and the choices are often much healthier than what you get at restaurants. I’ve taken cooking classes in Rome, Vietnam, Morocco, and Bali and loved them all!

When you do eat in a restaurant, try to choose healthier options. You can still try local cuisine, and still splurge from time to time, but try to stick to meals with lower carbs and lower fat. Avoid fried foods, foods with cream and butter, and food with sugars.

If the portions are large, which they usually are, eat just half the meal, then buy fruit at the market for dessert. You can eat the rest for lunch the next day. Or split the meal with someone else. It’s also better to eat the largest meal of the day earlier, like at lunch. Most europeans, and other cultures, already do this, so it’s easy to adopt.

I’ve never been on a fad diet in my entire life. I eat mostly well-balanced, healthy meals, but occasional splurge on a sausage and cheese pizza, a burger and fries, and creamy pastas. The key to maintaining weight is to eat what you can burn off. At least that’s half of the battle. The other half is exercising to stay fit.

Walking

Walking a city to see its sights is one of the easiest ways to get in some exercise and stay fit while traveling. You can easily get in 10,000-20,000 steps a day if you walk instead of using taxis or the metro. Sometimes up to 30,000. When you do this, you not only burn off calories, you experience much more of the city than you would zooming off in a taxi.

If you don’t walk a lot at home, start out small, with 3,000-5,000 steps a day, then work your way up so you don’t overdo it. And make sure to not venture in to bad parts of town when you walk. You can show your route to the reception to make sure,

It’s easy to measure your steps on the basic apps that come with your phone, but there are many other apps and fitness readers to get even better data. If monitoring your steps is a bit too much work, just know that spending a large portion of your day walking is good for you. The cardiovascular activity increases your heart rate and improves blood flow. It also helps to tone your legs and abdominal muscles.

Hiking

Spending a day or two of your trip hiking is also a great way to stay fit while traveling. You can arrange these as day trips, where you only carry some food and water, overnight trips, where you bring more gear, and hut-to-hut hikes, where you hike for several days.

New Zealand, Switzerland, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, and many more offer outstanding hiking opportunities. Even some surprising places have great hiking opportunities. I’ve hiked Mount Hallasan volcano on Jeju Island in South Korea, through the fabulous rock formations in Cappadocia, Turkey, and hiked to see the rock formation Es Vedra on Ibiza Island in Spain.

The app AllTrails features hikes all around the world, to help make it easy to find your way and stay on the trail. I’ve also used maps.me to find my way in remote places where there is no ‘official’ trail. Just download the map when you have wifi, so you can use it offline.

While advanced hiking trips take gear and preparation, short hikes only require a small daypack and some snacks, which you can pick up just about anywhere, making them super easy to add into your trip.

Running

A daily run can be a quick way to stay fit. A simple 30-minute jog in the morning can really get your metabolism fired up for the day. Plus it’s a great way to see parts of the city you may not otherwise see.

As above with walking, make sure to check that yIt stay in safe parts of the city.

Book Accommodation With A Gym Or Pool

Hotels often have a pool, or some type of gym or workout facility available, but with more and more digital nomads, more alternative accommodation is also offering gyms and/or workout equipment.

Did you know that you can filter on Airbnb for places that have workout equipment or facilities? Some just offer basics like free weights and yoga mats, while others provide access to a gym. This is an ideal way to make sure you can get in a workout or two while traveling. There are even hostels with workout facilities now.

I’m personally not a gym person, but have used these from time to time to try to stay fit while traveling. Obviously, the nicer hotels have nicer facilities that make working out while traveling enticing.

If the place you’re staying does not offer any workout equipment, ask about the closest gym and see if they offer a week pass or similar.

Workout In A Park

Better yet, take your fitness to a park or beach near you. My exercise of choice when I travel is yoga. I bring my yoga travel mat, which folds up in my luggage, and look for places to practice. Near the beach at sunset is usually my favorite spot, but anywhere I can have some peace is fine.

I’m a yoga teacher, so feel comfortable putting together my own personal yoga session, but there are many free apps that provide online yoga classes. One of my favorites is Down Dog. You can select the type of intensity you want and the length of class.

If you’re not into yoga, there are all kinds of classes on line to try, And if you use iPhone, Apple has now made Apple Fitness available on their phones. They offer kickboxing, HIIT, Yiga, Core, Pilates, Dance, and more.

One of my latest, quick, go-to exercises is four minutes of plank. I do two minutes of backward plank (above), then two minutes of forward plank. It’s amazing how just a few minutes can tone your core muscles and your arms.

Exercise bands are another nice option for outdoor workouts as they pack flat and can give you a workout comparable to free weights.

Cycling Around Your Destination

Cycling around your destination, or choosing a bicycling trip, is another great way to stay fit while traveling. Many major cities offer bicycles for rent on the street. If not, look for the local cycle shop. What better way to see a city than to cycle around it?

Fitness Focused Trips

Of course the best way to stay fit while traveling is to book an active adventure trip. If you’re skiing, scuba diving, snorkeling, surfing, yoga, horseback riding, or other adventures, you’ll likely come back in better shape than when you left!

One of my trips included riding horseback in the Loire Valley of France. We rode from castle to castle for 7 days, using the routes once used by horses and carriages. I felt so incredibly fit after this trip as horseback riding uses so many muscles. Plus, we still got to indulge in a lot of great food and wine at the end of the day.

At another I volunteered to teach yoga, fitness, and dance to refugees in a refugee camp in Greece. I was physically active abiut 20 hours a week, so felt incredible after my month of volunteering. Plus it was good for my soul to help out others.

If you have other great ways to stay fit while traveling, please add your thoughts and comments below.

Safe Travels!

Julie