Does anyone here travel for work? How does it affect your workouts and diet?

[Special K]

I thought I'd start a thread to see if there is anyone out there who travels for work but is also serious about their workouts and diet. How difficult is it for you to keep up your routine when you are traveling for work?

I have never had a job that involves travel, but now I am looking at a job that would require 2 annual trips to sea, each 3 weeks in length. It would also require sporadic travel throughout the year to other land sites, but those trips would only be for 2-3 days at a time. I don't have all the details yet, but I would assume most boats don't come equipped with a gym. The trips to other land sites would be a pain, but I could probably find a gym in whatever city I found myself in. I know hotels have gyms, but I've never seen one that is equipped for squats, deadlifts, etc.

Having said that, would it be possible to prevent muscle loss over a 3 week period, assuming I ate at maintenance and got enough grams of protein? Would doing pushups, situps, and other bodyweight exercises help at all? I would lose strength, but that could be regained fairly easily once I returned from the trips. I'm primarily concerned about the possibility of muscle loss. I normally take 2-3 one-week breaks from working out each year anyway, but 3 weeks at a time seems like too much time off for me.

Another issue common to both the sea and land trips would be the food quality. I doubt I would be able to cook my own meals, which means the quality of my meals would suffer.

On one hand, the thought of a job that doesn't involve being in a cube all day sounds exciting, but on the other hand an office job does allow me to stick to my diet and workout routine without much difficulty. My workouts and diet are important enough to me that I'm not sure if it's worth sacrificing them for a job. It's for this reason that I thought I'd ask around on here to see if there's anyone else who has a similar (or worse) travel schedule for work, yet also manages to make progress with their workouts and diet.

 

[brikis98]

I've never had to travel regularly for a job, but I typically take 1-2 vacation trips to foreign countries per year. Each trip is 2-3 weeks long and my fitness/diet ALWAYS suffer as a result. Finding conveniently located gyms outfitted for weight training (and especially the crazy crap I do for CF now) is never easy in a city you don't know. And yes, if you aren't cooking for yourself, you are eating at restaurants, which gives you far less control over your diet.

The good news is that body weight exercises are pretty damn effective if you go at them hard. Bodyweight only Crossfit style workouts are a great choice, but almost anything done at high intensity will work. A good mix of air squats, squat jumps, pistols, step ups, burpees, push-ups, handstand push-ups, pull-ups (on anything you can find), sit-ups, running, sprinting, climbing, etc will let you preserve muscle mass and conditioning very well. You most likely will lose strength on the big lifts - it's very hard to reproduce the stimulus of a heavy back squat or deadlift without a barbell - but not too much and it'll come back quickly.

 

[Capt Caveman]

I used to travel frequently and quite a bit overseas. Running was always easy to do and quite interesting, especially in Israel but not very safe in Mexico City. I made use of Hotel gyms for lifting and the occasional gym that was located close to the Hotel.

You may not necessarily be able to perform your regular routine but I always looked at it as a change of pace.

In regards to food, it's easy to go outside of your normal diet having to eat out all the time but I found there are plenty of places where you can find healthy meals and/or make special requests.