Travel
A trip every couple of months, plus three or four long ones a year. The programme has to degrade gracefully rather than stop — that’s the whole design requirement.
N=1, not medical advice. This is one person’s log, tuned to one set of injuries and constraints. Nothing here is a recommendation.
Last updated . This page changes when something changes, not on a schedule.
There is no travel programme, on purpose
I’ve tried keeping one and it was the wrong shape. A written travel protocol assumes every trip is the same trip, and they aren’t: a two-day sales trip with a hotel gym and a three-week trip through South America have nothing in common except that I’m not at home. A protocol built for both fits neither.
So what follows are principles and one tool, rather than a plan. The decisions get made per trip, and that’s the honest answer rather than a gap in the page.
Training on the road
The useful move is to stop thinking about what’s missing and start from what’s actually in the room. In practice there are three situations:
| Where | What’s available | What the session becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel room, nothing in it | bodyweight | Mobility and core carry the session. Push-ups, split squats, glute bridges, planks. Thirty minutes is plenty. |
| Room, with a band in the bag | + bands | The whole pull side comes back — face pulls, pull-aparts, banded rows. A band weighs nothing and is the highest-value thing I pack. |
| Hotel gym | + dumbbells | A real session. Dumbbell bench, rows, split squats, RDLs. Not as good as my gym, entirely good enough. |
The builder handles this directly: set the equipment to bodyweight, + bands or + dumbbells and it only draws movements you can actually do in that room. Set the duration to thirty minutes and it fits the session to the time rather than handing you something you’ll abandon halfway.
The rotation logic helps more when travelling than at home, oddly. On a trip the temptation is to fall back on the same three exercises you remember — and that’s exactly the monotony this whole thing is built to avoid.
Eating on the road
Two things travel well and everything else is negotiable:
- Protein at breakfast. Eggs and yoghurt exist in every country on earth. A hotel breakfast is usually the easiest high-protein meal of the trip — and the easiest one to waste on pastry.
- Water, more than at home. Flights, heat and a disrupted routine all pull the same direction, and hydration is already the weakest part of how I eat when I’m not travelling.
Beyond that: vegetables when they’re accessible rather than as a project, and keeping roughly to my usual near-zero alcohol despite the fact that every business trip is built to push the other way. That last one is easier than people expect, because nobody actually notices.
Local food is the point of being somewhere, and I’m not going to eat chicken and rice in a country I flew to. A week of eating properly where I am costs very little against months of ordinary weeks.
What I stop doing
- Chasing five sessions a week. Three is a good travel week. Two is fine. The goal is not losing the thread, not hitting a number.
- Logging loads. Hotel dumbbells are in pounds, or unmarked, or lying. The numbers wouldn’t compare to anything, so I don’t collect them.
- Worrying about progression. A fortnight of maintenance costs nothing across a year. Coming back injured or having quit costs a great deal.
- The fasted 07:30 slot. It exists because it fits my life at home. On a trip the session goes wherever there's a gap.
Questions this page answers
What is worth packing for training on a trip?
A band. It weighs nothing and is the highest-value thing I pack: with one in the bag the whole pull side comes back — face pulls, pull-aparts, banded rows — in a hotel room with nothing else in it.
How many sessions is a good travel week?
Three is a good travel week. Two is fine. The goal on a trip is not losing the thread, not hitting a number, and a fortnight of maintenance costs nothing across a year.
Do you log what you lift in a hotel gym?
No. Hotel dumbbells are in pounds, or unmarked, or lying, so the numbers wouldn’t compare to anything at home. I don’t collect them.
What isn’t working
- Nothing is written down before I leave. Every trip gets improvised at the airport, which mostly works and occasionally means the first three days are a write-off while I figure out the gym situation. Ten minutes of thought before packing would fix it.
- The band stays home more often than it travels. It weighs almost nothing and unlocks half the movements in the library. There is no argument for leaving it, and I leave it.
- Sleep is the thing that actually breaks, and I don’t manage it. Not the training, not the food — the sleep. Time zones, late dinners, hotel rooms. Everything downstream of sleep gets worse for the whole trip and I treat it as weather rather than something to plan around.
- The comeback week has no shape. I return and try to resume at full volume immediately, which is how the first week back reliably feels worse than the trip did.