No Excuses — How To Exercise While Traveling

Can we all agree that it’s challenging to exercise while traveling?

If you are like me, the routine at home is the fuel that keeps your reasonably well-oiled machine working out even when your motivation levels run low.

While on the road, however, and especially when moving from place to place every few days, there is no routine. So, I have to fuel my workouts with some creativity instead.

Suppose you like to exercise in a gym, but there isn’t a gym available. You can turn your hotel room into your own personal workout space with a little imagination. In Vladivostok, Russia, for example, we found huge bottles of water for a robust weight-lifting circuit and chairs for push-ups and dips.

Not enough floor space for that idea? Use the bed for a mountain climber slick track, and hang off the end to do your low weight water bottle lifting—Y’s T’s L’s and W’s are the perfect antidotes to the backpacker’s hunch. Oh, and the bunk beds on the Trans-Siberian railway make a great Captain’s chair for core strengthening!

Don’t forget, too, that the outside world is an enormous gymnasium! Benches are for the moves you learned in step class. Fences are your barres for stretching. Playgrounds are an assortment of pull-up and row exercises disguised in kid colors. Ever done burpees timed to pushing your child on a swing?

Maybe you prefer to do a sport for exercise. Great! Can you bring the ball with you? We traveled all through Asia with an old focus mitt to remind us to keep up with our martial arts training. What can you do without the gear? I didn’t need any equipment to practice, just enough empty space to do some kicks and punches, some stretches, and run through a kata or two.

So, you are perfectly equipped to stay strong and limber while on the road. But wait. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’ve only got a little time in the place you are staying and a ton of things you want to see. That urgency almost always wins out over my itch to go for a jog.

Know what? It sounds funny, but one of the most enjoyable mornings I had while getting to know a new city was the morning when all five members of my family jogged our way through the streets of Luoyang, China. It’s an energetic and effective way to tour your surroundings!

Better yet? Rent some bikes! We happened upon a sidewalk rental place in Broadway Park in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and spent the rest of the afternoon covering vast swathes of the city with our feet pedaling.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of walking to keep our blood circulating and our metabolism high. If instead of taking a car, we walk to as many of those must-see destinations as possible, we are checking our tourist boxes, staying healthy, and helping to keep our planet healthy too.

I’m saving the best for last, though.

So far, I’ve only suggested ideas that require your own powers of creativity and discipline. Well, if you are like me, you push yourself much harder when you are in a class with a teacher and other students to motivate you.

So…go to those classes in another country!

You can have an authentic cultural experience and get your sweat on all at once! I tried flying yoga for the first time at the Yoga Mama studio in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. I learned a new kung fu form while training at the Shaolin Temple in the Henan Province of northern China. I earned some blood blisters in a Kyokushin Karate dojo in Khabarovsk, Russia. So much fun!

My Russian, Chinese, and Kyrgyz vocabulary is pretty limited, but I made an important discovery: you don’t need to speak the language. In exercise classes you share a human body language. It’s amazing.

One of our goals while traveling is to connect with locals. Well, I met Lana in a yoga class, and she invited the whole family to join her for a hike in the Siberian wilderness the following weekend. While practicing martial arts at a playground in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (which often devolved into lessons on basic blocks for the curious local children there), my kids and I were invited to join Baysaa at his first soccer practice the following day.

It’s painfully easy to find excuses to not exercise, especially while traveling. There is no routine, there is no gym, there are more important things to do or see, we don’t speak the language, it’s dirtier or more crowded than we are used to, we don’t want to create a spectacle (did I ever tell you about the time a driver in Uzbekistan parked in the middle of a traffic circle to film me practicing my martial arts?)…the list goes on.

Here’s what I’ve learned from living the past seven months nomadically:

Exercise while traveling is necessary, and can even be the highlight of one’s experience in a given city. While it’s tempting to say, “This might be the only time I’m at the Kremlin,” I have to declare instead that “This is also the only body I get in my lifetime; if I want to keep traveling, or keep living for that matter, I have to keep it in shape.”

Distilling my experiences to write this article has me feeling pumped! Thanks for reading, and please share: tell me what keeps you strong on the road. I will appreciate the motivation to keep this anatomical machine of mine working at its best.