Keeping fit on holiday

Fitting an exercise regime into your holiday

When you have a holiday on the horizon, it’s an opportunity to look forward to some well-earned rest, relaxation and a bit of down-time. However, a couple of weeks completely devoid of any exercise is a guaranteed way to lose a lot of your hard-earned fitness.

As a rule of thumb, you lose fitness at twice the rate you gain it, so two weeks of no activity will set you back a whole month.
So what is the best way of maintaining your fitness whilst on holiday without detracting from the holiday itself? The solution is a holiday maintenance programme which will keep your fitness levels ticking over and still allow your mind and body some quality rest and relaxation. The result is that your batteries are recharged and post holiday, you are raring to get back into your usual fitness routine. Importantly, your fitness won’t plummet so you should be able to resume your usual training where you left off.

Maintaining your fitness

So what does a fitness maintenance programme involve? It should cover the four primary areas of fitness, namely:

• Strength
• Flexibility
• Core
• Cardiovascular

Before you rush headlong into a full training programme, to get the most out of your holiday and to also permit your body to rebuild, your training should be much lighter than your usual routine; after all, you are on holiday! The idea is that you exercise enough to minimise your fitness losses — so that returning to your usual sessions is nice and easy.
By adopting this maintenance strategy, you can often find that on your return from holiday, you actually make further improvements because your body has had the opportunity to fully repair; which is when fitness gains occur.

Rest is good!

It is a common myth that training improvements occur when you are actually exercising. When you lift a heavier weight or run faster or further during a training session, you see the result of your gains, not a specific improvement itself. Fitness gains do not occur during your training session, they occur when you are resting. Rest is the time when your body adapts to training loads and becomes stronger.

Hence rest is always the most important component of any exercise programme.
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