Tips On How To Keep Up Your Exercise While Traveling On Business

There are two tricks to staying full of beans, with a heavy travel schedule, (1) eat right (not easy) and (2) keep up your exercise program (tougher still). Beans from our vegetable garden. Yum!

I used to travel on business a lot, but I always kept up with my Ironman training, by using two critical tools, discipline and planning. I integrated exercise with my travel and business, plans.

Tips On Exercise While Traveling

I’ve travelled to many a meeting in Europe, and further afield, sometimes being away for weeks. The Nook sure helped, and note my running shoes and cords, while I have a change of running gear in the bag. Photo by FitOldDog.

Based on FitOldDog’s triathlon training and lots of business flights

1. Make a plan, and negotiate it with your business colleagues, explaining its importance to your health, and ask them to join you.
2. Travel light, but include your training gear.
3. If you can’t take your gear, find a substitute – e.g. cords if there is no pool available, weight room if you can’t bring your bike (squats are great for improving hill climbs).
4. Find business training partners in every business city, and they will help you to stick to your plan.
5. Inform people running meetings near your planned lunch-time run, that you told everyone about before the meeting started, that you’ll have to leave at your planned time to get your run, and if you dare, do it! No job is worth risking your health for some dumb meeting that’s poorly planned, and most business meetings go on too long, anyway (see why big business has so many meetings, at this link). You might just provide everyone else in the room with just the excuse they needed to stop that person going on, and on, and on!
   

   Eating and blogging – yummy beans from our garden. Photo by FitOldDog.

6. Look around the room, and observe the state of your colleagues who don’t exercise, especially the workaholics chasing their way up the ladder. I suspect that they might be happier where they are, with a little meditation, good food and regular workouts. Usually one look is enough to get you moving – I’ve seen colleagues change, over a period of 20 years, from fit young, enthusiastic men and women, into overweight, stressed, heart attack ready wrecks. Terrible to see!
7. Meditate – this is good for everything in your life.
8. On planes, running on the spot, stretching routines, and selected Yoga positions, work well, but don’t run in the restroom.  A flight attendant once told me a story, on an international flight, while I actually was running on the spot in a wide gangway. He said, that one time, the pilots reported a banging noise in the cockpit, but it was to be heard nowhere else on the aircraft! All the crew discretely searched for the source of this sinister sound, and ground control engineers nearly had them turning around mid-Atlantic. Then, the attendant said, he saw a guy come out of the restroom, all sweaty in running gear, he worked out what was going on, told the pilots, and the flight went on it’s way.
9. If your boss is horribly out of shape, and objects to you leaving meetings that overrun their time, for which you scheduled and announced your exercise plans, find a new boss.
10. Workouts can be great, at the end of the business day, before drinks and dinner! You can have a beer with your colleagues AFTER your run. They’ll still be in the bar, and you’ll enjoy it even more.

You can do it, I know you can!

Happy Trails,

FitOldDog