Getting fitter on vacation

Some people find that over the vacation period it is really hard to keep the weight off and keep fitness levels up. It's all too easy to find other things to do than work out - after all, we go on vacation to have a break from our 'normal' lives don't we?

I'm currently on vacation in Sweden, and have been trying to work healthy eating and exercise into my daily routine.

So far, I've been 50% successful. Why 50%? Because the exercise is going well, but the healthy eating doesn't seem to be going so well.

Vacation exercise

This vacation, I haven't been able to run so far - the blister I gained in the 10k Samrun is only just healing (it stopped weeping a few days ago... gross...). So to keep exercising I've switched to a bodyweight exercise program put together by Craig Ballantyne at Turbulence Training. It's one of the bonus reports you get when you buy the full package.

I started off last week on the 'beginner' bodyweight program which I thought would be very easy, but I thought I'd do it to just 'ease myself back into it'. Well I surprised myself - certain parts of it were much tougher than I expected!

I think that what this shows is that my previous weights work has been focused on just a few body areas, and my untrained areas were seriously exposed by the exercises.

One of the great things about the program is that it focuses a lot on single leg body weight moves. Not just do these mean that you are putting twice the stress on your legs than if you were doing the exercise with both legs, but it also means that you need to balance yourself much more throughout each exercise, so making the muscles work even harder (as well as activating all those core muscles which I neglected in my previous gym work).

I've only done 4 workouts so far, so shouldn't expect results yet. But I do feel stronger, and a little more defined.

One of Craig's sayings, however, is that you can't out-train a bad diet, which brings us on to the part of my holiday which has been less succesful.

Healthy eating on vacation



Other than a few days in the middle of my holiday, when my mother in law was cooking, I felt that I'd been eating and drinking fairly sensibly, and along the lines of my 6 eating rules I talked about before.

However, over the course of a week, I've only lost 2 lbs. It felt like it should have been more. So I've restarted using a food diary on Sparkpeople (it's totally free) to make a much bigger effort in recording the food I actually eat, as well as being meticulous about portion sizes. Just this morning, for instance, I found that I was eating 100g of muesli each morning - which is over 300 calories!! It's not so much effort to put the bowl on the scales each morning, pour in muesli until it gets to 50g on the scale, and then pour in 0.1% fat yoghurt until it gets to 150g total. Easy!

So let's see if in the last week of my holiday I can achieve a bit more weight loss!

Energy for life

At work a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an 'energy for life' workshop, which talked about some of the things you can do to have a bit more energy at work - very useful for me given my normal working hours regularly exceeding 70 hours a week.

A cynical view of what the trainer said was "Eat better, exercise more, go to bed earlier", but I think that vastly over-simplifies what, for me, was a great session.

A couple of things which I found really useful:

What gives you energy? At this point we weren't talking about food, but more about what are the things which happen at work which make you more excited or energetic. We started off by remembering something in the last week or two which really got us buzzing. For me, it was making a plan to help us target a new market. The trainer then asked a very simple question - why don't you do more of that? I'd got so caught up in thinking about what I need to do to make other people happy that I'd never stopped to ask myself about what are the things in my day that make me happy, and how can I do more of them. Promise to myself - make sure I carve out a few hours each week to set a big plan in motion.

How do you feel when you eat? Very interesting question. Some people said "guilty", others said "calm". For me, the answer was "relieved" because I'm typically ravenous whenever I eat. Again, something I'd never thought of before. Promise to myself - try to have a little bit of fruit throughout the day, so that I'm less ravenous when I sit down to lunch and will hopefully make more sensible choices.

Why don't you exercise more? Again, lots of interestng answers, but mostly "I don't have the time to exercise". That was my answer too... Most of us were thinking that it's hard to carve out the 75-90 minutes we need to go to the gym or to go for a run, and that was our rationale for not doing more. That was when the trainer asked her follow-up question "Do you have 15 minutes a day to be able to do some exercise?". It's hard to say you can't find 15 minutes. She showed us a routine you can do with one of those exercise bands which you can do in 15 minutes in your office which works most of the major muscle groups. Okay, so it didn't feel like you were going to get a cover-page body by doing these things, but it's got to be better than doing nothing! We also discussed the things I was talking about in my last post on Combining exercise with daily activities, like walking to work (even just a bit of it) or using the stairs. Promise to myself - always use the stairs in the office. Unless rushing to get to a meeting, always get off the tube one stop early (morning and night).

She also covered nutrition - more on that in my next post.

Combining exercise into daily routine

A dull title, but a beautiful morning in London!!

On the way into work this morning, there was no tube service on the Piccadilly line, meaning I needed to take the Circle line to St James and then walk from there - something like a 20-25 minute walk.

I'm actually feeling rather virtuous - I could have taken a couple of different connections to avoid the walk, but it was such a nice day that I decided to walk - here's a picture (taken with my Blackberry phone, so not great quality...)



Anyway, it got me to thinking of all of the other ways I might be able to combine exercise into my daily routine (hence the title of this post).

There are the 'normal' tips of never taking a lift/elevator and always using the stairs, or getting off the bus/tube/train a stop earlier and walking the rest, or parking your car a little further away.

Well just because they've been talked about for years doesn't mean that they don't make sense or that they're not useful! I guess that I've never bothered with these kinds of things because I always tell myself that I don't have time. Logically, that has to be wrong, because it MUST be more time-efficient to get 15 minutes of exercise by getting off the tube a bit further away from work each morning (total time cost = 75 minutes) versus going to the gym for half an hour (total time cost, still around 75 minutes and that's if you're lucky enough to have the gym almost on your doorstep).

I've come across a website promoting a system called "Turbulence Training", and one of the key parts of the programme is building exercise into your daily routine. It must make sense, so I'm going to be doing more of this...

How do you build exercise into your daily routine?