#131: Training on Vacation: Stop, Switch, or Scale Back? (+ Tips for Coming Back After a Break)

Vacation season is here - and with the kids around and more fun things to do, you want to enjoy it all. But what should you do about strength training?

In this episode, I discuss your options:

1. Take a break from training

If you decide to take time off, I share tips for how to get back on track after your vacation ends - without guilt or overwhelm.

2. Scale back your workouts

Learn how to adjust your routine so you're still stimulating your muscles and maintaining momentum, even with a lighter schedule.

3. Train with resistance bands

If you’re traveling and don’t have access to weights, I explain how to use resistance bands to challenge your muscles effectively.

Whatever you do, remember that strength training is a long-term commitment, and learning to adapt your routine during life’s busy seasons is part of what makes it sustainable over the decades ahead.

Enjoy the show!

Transcript

#131: Training on Vacation: Stop, Switch, or Scale Back? (+ Tips for Coming Back After a Break)

 [00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, and I am actually back on the mic after. I think I recorded the last podcasts about a month ago, so it feels like I haven't talked to you in forever, though, of course, as these get released, little by little, you talked to me last week, or you heard from me last week, and I have to say that in between here, I have been on a two week vacation, which is probably the first real two week break I've taken.
I don't even know how long, because for many years when I was working full-time and I was a marketing leader in B2B companies, so I was working full-time and then doing this on the side, and so all my evenings, my [00:01:00] weekends, and my holidays were all about doing 40+ fitness, the podcast, my programs, handling clients, all the things.
And this was the first time that I almost completely unplugged those of you who follow me on Instagram, who on Facebook, you saw my stories. We had a little bit of an adventure on the sea because our boat first, one of the batteries failed. It was a brand new battery, just emptied and would not recharge, so we had to go buy a new battery.
And that's not so simple when you're talking about doing something when you're on the sea. And then after about seven days on the sea, a little less than that actually, the engine broke, so, so we were kind of stranded on an island for a few days and. It was not a bad stranding, it just meant that we couldn't go anywhere.
But the island had a [00:02:00] shop. The only thing we were really low on was water. So it was kind of exciting every day to try to figure out like, so how are we going to like wash the dishes, wash ourselves, you know? So, but what I wanna say about the vacation was that. I think my biggest goal on that vacation was just to decompress to de-stress.
It felt so good to do nothing. I mean, it brought me back to when. You know when you were kids and you had the whole summer off and you actually could get bored because back then there wasn't all the social media and Netflix and everything to do. So you really had to, you could just do nothing or read a book or lie in the sun and, and really just veg.
And I think it is so good for us to sometimes just unplug. And I also gave myself permission to not worry at all about my [00:03:00] fitness. So I mean, we're on a small boat. It's not a big boat. I mean one day for the fun of it, like I did a little tiny bit of exercise, but I mean, it was not a workout. We did walk on the islands, but that was part of like exploring where we work.
'cause every island is so very, very unique. And, and eating. Because when you're on a boat, you don't really have stuff to eat. Like you can't be snacking all the time. And we had to cook and it was a small little one burner kitchen and this kind of thing. So, I feel pretty amazing after that we slept.
 I think, I haven't slept so soundly in months. So what I wanna say here, I guess to you, and the reason why I wanna share this is that I want you to give yourself the same kind of permission that I gave me to sometimes just not be achieving and. I know I'm, I'm a overachiever type A personality. If I am not doing something, I [00:04:00] feel guilty and I wanna do something.
 So this was just so good for me, I think and I have a feeling that maybe some of you out there are a little bit similar. So catch up on your sleep, enjoy yourself. Have fun with your significant other. We got to reconnect in a whole new way because no work stress, no kid stress, no nothing. So that was really wonderful. 
And now coming back, I've gotten back into the weight room. So this is another question that I get often is, so how, how do you come back after vacation and I would say carefully, you might get very sore depending on how long your vacation is. So I was out of the weight room for about two weeks, which is not terrible.
That's not a huge amount of time. But I definitely noticed a decrease in my capabilities because this is year four for me, and I've been training hard all four [00:05:00] years. So I am constantly kind of keeping my body at a level that is beyond what I need in boating everyday life, and your body and your muscles are use it or lose it kind of asset.
So as soon as your body notices that, hey, she hasn't really needed to pick up anything that heavy in a while. So I guess she doesn't need these muscles anymore. It starts to get rid of them. Muscle atrophy is a real thing and it starts to happen quite quickly. But the good news is that it also comes back fairly quickly
I started my first sessions, so my first upper and lower body sessions, I started just with much lower expectation for my body. I, um, I decided that. I am going to go two to three reps from failure. So those of you who have been lifting for a while and who have listened to me for a while, that you, you [00:06:00] probably understand the concept of going to failure.
So going to the point where you can't do another rep with good form and one of the, signs that you're getting close to failure is that you have that involuntary slowdown, but when you've been lifting for a long time, you start to know when you're getting close. And so the sessions felt in a way, to me, very light because three reps from failure, I wasn't even experiencing the voluntary slowdown then and.
I was really not very sore, but this strategy has worked really well for me because then my body was able to recover well from those sessions. And then I was able to push a little bit harder in the next session and last time I lifted. So I've been back. I mean, I've done four or five sessions now, and the last time I left it, I was able to do close to what I was before, so using my old weights, but maybe being a rep or [00:07:00] maybe two reps shy of before and. You know, I'll just keep working on it. This is a journey. I mean, it is a lifelong endeavor, like hobby, part of our lifestyle, and there are always going to be kind of ups and downs, and some of the ups and downs will come because maybe you have more stress in your life, and so your body is not recovering as well, so you're not able to train as hard or you can't sleep as well.
Maybe you've been sick and you're coming back from illness, and of course, and the thing that nobody likes to talk about, but injury like, you know, you will get injured every now and again. Every now and again, you are going to go a little beyond your capabilities or your form is going to go wrong or whatever.
You're gonna injure yourself. It happens to every athlete, and I use that word, athlete, people who exercise with some kind of [00:08:00] intention I mean, soccer players, tennis players, joggers, everybody sometimes has an injury or something, and then that means that you make some adaptations, maybe you're not doing that thing for a little while.
You're skipping some muscles for a little while. So for me, for example, my hamstring, um, has been bothering me on my left side. So I've had to adapt my training lately. To let that heal. And that comes from a childhood injury that I had that, you know, these things come back and haunt you in midlife. It really, really sucks.
 But , I just wanted to talk a little bit about how to come back from vacation and if you are somebody who is on vacation for a longer period of time. So one of my customers, for example, she was going to be away from the gym. She normally trains three days a week at the gym and she knew that where she was going, she was gonna be gone for four [00:09:00] weeks and no access to a gym.
So she actually had me swap her over to a dumbbells only program and did that for the four weeks that she was away. And that worked really, really well for her, and she enjoyed that. It was a nice little change of pace. Other things you can do is just cut down on the number of sessions that you're doing if you're on vacation.
So, summer for me, for example, I want to enjoy the good weather while it's happening. There is live music events outside. This coming weekend. I'm going to a music festival, three days of partying. Yes, I party. I am not, I am not one of those. Fitness influencers was like, I haven't drank alcohol in six years.
I know it would be better not to drink alcohol, but I think it's fun. Right now I'm doing it. I'm doing it much less than I used to a few years back, but so this week I don't have the opportunity to train four days a week. [00:10:00] So I'm training three days a week, and I've done that other weeks as well.
So when you cut back on how many times you train, you just need to be smart with your programming. Um, you want to train each of your muscle groups. Twice a week, ideally. So if you normally train four days a week and you're cutting back to three, then do one upper body, one lower body, and one full body session.
That way you'll hit all your muscle groups twice. Or if you normally train four days a week and you're cutting down to two, then do two full body sessions. Okay, not just one upper body and one lower body. It'd be more effective at maintaining your muscles and maintaining your strength if you do the two full body sessions
so those are some things you can do. And then finally bands. So these resistance bands, those are super convenient. So if you are somebody that, for [00:11:00] example, you travel a lot and you don't want to just not do anything 'cause it feels good, you have the time in your hotel room, business, travel, whatever.
And your hotel doesn't have a gym. Of course, if your hotel has a gym, then make use of that. But resistance brands are good for that. They train you in a different way because they are hardest when the band is most stretched out, and that offers a different resistance profile than when you're using dumbbells or cables and machines.
So it is a little bit of a different system. And with resistance bands, you can't just be like, okay, give me zero resistance level one resistance, level two resistance level three. You don't have the same kind of way of measuring how much resistance you're applying to yourself.
So when you're working with resistance [00:12:00] bands, just choose a resistance that feels hard, or let's say challenging when you do eight reps and then just go until you're close to failure. That's about the best kind of guidelines for that. It can be even a lower rep range. But the point is that there, you can't do so much of counting weights and reps to make sure that you're loading your muscle sufficiently.
But there you need to be more aware of how close am I getting to failure? So the point is just to push your muscles close to their limits to remind your body that, Hey, I need these muscles, so don't get rid of them. Even if I am not in the weight room like I normally am. I mean resistance training, what is it? In the end,
it really is you tricking your body into providing you with more muscle tissue than [00:13:00] you actually need in your day to day life. And you're doing that tricking by going and doing strength training and holding things that are heavier than what you actually carry in your everyday life.
You might say like, well why, why on earth would I wanna do that? and, okay then I'll refer you back to podcast episodes I think it was 100 and 101. Where I talk about the benefits of strength training and the benefits of having more muscle because both those things confer benefits and it is really important for us to be holding onto our muscle and strength training so that our whole bodies stay strong, not just our muscles, but our joints and our ligaments, and our bones as well.
Okay, so I actually started this episode, recording thinking I would be talking about something else, but now this was about then what to do when you're on vacation or things you [00:14:00] can do while you're on vacation, which is basically you can do like I did, which is nothing, just enjoy your vacation, focus on something else.
Focus on improving your sleep. Focus on building your relationships with the people that you're on vacation with and just enjoying it and just let go of your strength training program for that week or two that you're on vacation and that is totally fine. In the grand scheme of the decades that you're gonna be doing this.
It's nothing and you'll be able to build it back up in the weeks ahead.
Second thing you can do is you can reduce how many times you're training so that, let's say you're taking weekend trips to the beach, you don't need to worry about training on the weekend because you're able to fit in your training sessions during the week.
 So you can reduce the number of times you train in a week. And then the third option is to use something like resistance bands and use them [00:15:00] just to stimulate your muscles. So there, I think about it more as like, stimulating your muscle with what you've got, which is the resistance band. You won't be able to do the same kind of strength training as when you're progressive overloading that you do when you're counting reps and then increasing your weights over time but you can still stimulate your muscles.
Okay, so, and with that, I leave you and wish you an incredible August and yeah, wherever you are in the world, I know if you're listening to this from Australia, it's not summer vacation for you, but maybe hold on these tips for when you do go on vacation there and I'll talk to you again next week.
Happy training.