Travel Fitness

Business travel carries two basic challenges: nutrition and exercise. Eating out is always a dangerous activity as most restaurants do not make it easy to navigate calorie counts. Packing workout gear adds weight and complexity to my travel light philosophy and I do not like to make use of hotel fitness facilities.

So what to do?

I know in advance that I will be eating more calories than normal however I make sure that I eat small portions and I really watch the calorie counts for breakfast and lunch. I know that I will not be able to hit my target nutritional profile over the next few days. Oh well.

In terms of exercise, I do two things: I walk as much as I can — often two or three hours of walking a day. And I do a modified core conditioning workout in my hotel room.

Here is my in-room exercise routine.

I pick a set of four exercises for lower body, upper body and core. I do three sets of these exercises. Each set consists of five exercises with 15 reps or less per exercise: lower body exercise, upper body exercise, lower body exercise, upper body exercise, core.

For example:

• Standing lunge with 8-10 reps on each side
• Pushups with 8-10 reps
• Stationary squats with 15 reps
• Side planks with 8-10 reps on each side
• Bicycle style crunches with 15 reps

I will repeat the above set of exercises three times. That, combined with a couple of hours of walking, will maintain fitness levels for a few days. By the way, nothing hard and fast about the type of exercises I use. I do so many that I will often substitute them with other types of exercise to add variety. Just as long as I pick lower, upper, lower, upper and then core.

So let’s do a quick recap of yesterday.

Breakfast
Calories: 140, Carbs: 14 grams, Protein: 20 grams, Fat: 0 grams

Lunch
Calories: 352, Carbs 38 grams, Protein: 28 grams, Fat: 11 grams

Dinner (eating out so best estimate based on restaurant’s online nutritional information)
Calories: 1,140, Carbs: 90 grams, Protein: 48 grams, Fat: 66 grams (yikes!)

Total intake
Calories: 1,742, Carbs: 161, Protein: 97 grams, Fat: 77 grams
Sodium intake of 3,279 mg (another yikes) and total fibre intake of 14 grams.

Net caloric intake after exercise: 1,118

Exercise

Hard interval training on the bike for one hour which burned 625 calories.

Stretching

I did do some light stretching.