TIPS FOR STAYING FIT WHILE TRAVELING

Quite often I’ve found my butt on an airplane, something I look forward to with the same enthusiasm as a dental appointment, traveling to and from various personal appearances. Since I do spokesmodel work for different companies, they fl y me around to fi tness, bodybuilding, and nutrition expositions to sign photos, answer workout/meal plan questions, and basically represent them to industry members and the general public. Usually these conventions are spaced apart throughout the year so they’re a nice break in my routine. Sometimes, though, they come in a schedule-shattering, cross-country cluster from Atlanta to Los Angeles. How do you stay in shape during such a hectic travel schedule? I’m sure this thought has entered the minds of more than a few of you frequent fl yers out there. It might also have passed right through them once you realized solving the dilemma requires a little bit of thought and planning. Fortunately, I can share my personal experiences in the form of a few tips to help you stay fi t while on the go. 

1. Prepare a Carry-On Meal for Your Travel Day

If you’re looking for lots of sodium, sugar, and saturated fat, airline food might be the way to go. I think the buttery sauce on the “sautéed chicken nasty” they almost served me one time could actually have equaled my daily allotment of fat grams. Add to that the salted peanuts coupled with the high glycemic piece of cake, and I’d be nicely bloated by landing time. Thanks to a little preplanning, however, I now bring plastic containers with a grilled chicken breast and mixed vegetables to keep me from resorting to airline cuisine.

On one fl ight I even heard an envious passenger a couple of rows behind me breathe a sigh of regret as he said to his seatmate, “That looks a heck of a lot better than what we got.” If you’re not into cooking, as I’m usually not, you can also simply pick up a healthful meal, like a chicken or turkey breast salad on pita, to go from the drive-through window of many popular fastfood restaurants. You’ll notice just about all the major franchises are now catering to fi tness folk with special high-protein, low-fat food options.

Bringing my own food on the plane has two benefi ts. First, it helps me stick to my nutrition plan. Second, it helps me mentally stay in control of the situation and keeps me focused right from the start that this trip doesn’t have to interfere with my fi tness program.

2. Make Sure Your Hotel Has a Gym

This one is very important. The fi rst thing I do when I get my itinerary is to call the hotel to make sure it has some sort of workout facility. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just a lifecycle, elliptical trainer, or treadmill for my morning cardio and a multistation universal gym for some basic weight training suits me fi ne for short trips. I get to stay in the exercise mode while getting a break from my normal routine. Surprisingly, I sometimes return home in better shape, tighter and more defi ned, than when I left. Because I have a tendency to overtrain a bit, I guess this abbreviated travel routine gives my body a needed rest and my muscles a chance to fi ll out.

If your hotel doesn’t have a gym, like some of the no-frills ones I’ve been put in, you still have a couple of other training options. Number 1, check out local gyms, some of which usually have deals open to fi tness-oriented hotel guests. Ask someone at the front desk for details. Number 2, use your room. Remember, exercises using your own body weight, like push-ups and stomach crunches, can help you stay pumped and get blood fl owing to those working muscles. Of course, for cardiovascular activity there’s always walking and jogging. These are also great ways to see the area where you’re staying, a feat that’s otherwise diffi cult for me considering I’m stuck inside convention halls most of the day.

I’d also like to recommend that no matter what exercise you’re planning, make it a priority. Try to do a good portion of it fi rst thing in the morning to ensure you get it in. Too many times the days tend to get away from us when we’re traveling, and if we put off working out until the later hours, it often gets left out completely.

3. Eating Healthy While Traveling Is No More Diffi cult than Eating Poorly

If even the fast-food places offer low-fat, low-calorie food options, there’s no excuse for straying from your nutrition plan while you’re away. As I always say, eating well takes no more time than eating badly. It just requires that you take a moment to think about what you’re putting in your mouth. Stay in control by practicing some discipline, and you’ll thank yourself for it when you get home.

4. Don’t Forget Your Supplements

We’ve already established that traveling doesn’t have to translate into a vacation or deviation from our fi tness lifestyles. So if you’re currently using any supplements, there’s no reason not to bring them with you.

Following as much of your usual daily schedule as possible will help keep you in the fi tness mode while traveling so that by the time you return home, you might just be in even better shape than when you left.

DIETING TO BUILD PURE MUSCLE

Diet is probably the most fundamentalcomponent ofthe bodybuilder’smakeup. The foodyou eat becomes the fuel that allows you to perform heavy sets of muscle-building exercise, as well as becoming the primary fuel of your nervous system and brain. All mental functions, from choosing a biceps exercise to abstract philosophical contemplation, are fueled by what you put into your mouth. Because this aspect of bodybuilding is so fundamental, it can be broken down logically into some basic arithmetic. To start off, let’s conduct an elementary caloric analysis of human tissue. It’s a fact that a pound of human muscle tissue will yield about 600 calories when measured with a device known as a calorimeter, while a pound of fat will yield 3,500 calories. We will return to these numbers in a moment.

As a bodybuilder, you must strive to increase your percentage of organic muscle while simultaneously reducing your stores of bodyfat. The reward for success is a more functional and effi cient (not to mention well-chiseled) physique. Unfortunately, the average bodybuilder fi nds it nearly impossible to gain even ten pounds of solid muscle tissue in a year’s time, due largely to the person’s falling prey to the hype and outright B.S. that is propagated by most bodybuilding publications and that lines the pockets of more than a few gym owners and personal trainers.

Fortunately, to reach a solution to your nutritional problems, you needn’t try to sort through the dubious proclamations of the bodybuilding publishing industry (most representatives of which exist solely to sell you their products, but that’s another story entirely). Instead, you need look no further than the fi eld of nutritional science. You will quickly learn that all that is required in the course of a year to allow for ten pounds of muscle growth would be 600 (the number of calories in a pound of muscle) times 10 (the number of pounds of muscle growth stimulated in a year), or 6,000 extra calories a year over and above your present energy requirements.