People ask me how I stay in shape when I am away, and they usually want to hear something about willpower. There is no willpower involved. Willpower is what you use when you have not decided yet. I decided years ago, so now it is just admin.
I travel a fair bit. Some of it is work, some of it is because I like being somewhere warm with nothing on the calendar. Either way the training does not stop, it just gets smaller and uglier for a week or two, and then it goes back to normal.
Routine beats motivation, every single time
Motivation is a feeling and feelings are not a plan. Routine is a decision you made once so you do not have to keep making it. On a normal week at home I know what day it is by what I am training, and that is not discipline, that is just how my week is shaped.
When I travel, the shape has to survive. So I do not try to keep the whole programme. I keep the frame. Something hard three times in the week, something for the legs at least once, and I walk everywhere instead of getting cars. That is it. Everything else is a bonus.
The men I know who fall apart on holiday are the ones who try to keep the full split going in a hotel basement with two dumbbells and a broken cable machine. Two days in they miss a session, decide the week is ruined, and write the whole trip off. Then they come home ten days behind instead of two.
What I actually take with me
Not much. A pair of trainers I can lift and walk in, a resistance band that weighs nothing, and a skipping rope. That is the entire kit and it fits in the gap at the side of a bag.
The band is the useful one. It turns a hotel room into somewhere you can do rows, pull aparts, curls and lateral raises, which covers most of what falls apart first when you stop training. Nobody ever got out of shape because they missed a week of bench. It shows up in the back and shoulders long before it shows up anywhere else.
I do not take supplements away with me. I have never once come home and been able to point at a scoop of anything and say that was the difference.
Hotel gyms are worse than you think
Almost every hotel gym is the same room. Three treadmills, one of them out of order, a set of dumbbells that stop at twelve kilos, and a machine nobody has ever worked out the purpose of. If you go in expecting to train the way you train at home you will leave annoyed.
So I go in with a plan that suits the room. High reps, short rest, and I make the twelves feel like twenty fives by slowing everything down and refusing to put them down between sets. There is no glory in it and nobody is watching, which is fine, because on a normal week plenty of people are.
If the hotel gym is genuinely useless, I use the stairs. Ten flights carrying nothing, then ten flights carrying my own bodyweight in a different way. Nobody has ever stopped me and I have been in some quite serious hotels.
Eating away from home without making it a project
I do not count anything when I travel. I do three things. Protein at every meal, water before every drink, and I walk. That is the whole system and it has never let me down for a fortnight.
What ruins men abroad is not the food. It is the drinking, and then the eating that happens because of the drinking at one in the morning. I am not going to pretend I never do that. I am saying that when I do it, I know that is the choice I made, and I do not then blame the pasta.
The one rule I never break
I train on the first morning. Always. Whatever time I landed, however little sleep I got, something hard happens before I have properly arrived. It is not about the session, the session is usually rubbish. It is about the fact that the trip now has training in it, and everything after that is just continuing.
Break it on day one and you spend the rest of the week negotiating with yourself. Do it on day one and there is nothing left to negotiate.
That is genuinely all of it. No secret, no programme worth selling you. Decide once, keep the frame, train on the first morning, and stop treating a week away like it is a test you can fail.
The mistake almost everybody makes
They try to earn the trip. Two weeks of extra sessions beforehand, then a week away doing nothing, then a week of punishment when they get back. Three weeks of chaos to cover seven days.
Nothing needs earning. You are not in debt to your own training. A week at maintenance is a week at maintenance, and your body has no idea that you were somewhere with a pool.
The other one is packing kit you will not use. I have watched men carry a weighted vest through an airport. It came home unopened. If it needs its own space in the case, it is not travel kit.
Although if you want to know what I am like on the last night of a trip, when the training is done and there is nothing left to be disciplined about, that is a different conversation and not one I have out here.