#177: How to Train Less & Keep Your Muscle During Vacation

It's summer and you'd rather be outside doing the things you can only do this time of year than stuck inside at the gym. BUT, you also don't want to lose everything you've been building.

So how do you balance enjoying your summer without losing your gains?

Well, it depends on how you're spending your summer. 

In this episode, I go through three different scenarios and what I recommend for each one, so you can actually enjoy this summer without stressing about losing muscle.

Enjoy the show!

Transcript

#177: How to Train Less & Keep Your Muscle During Vacation

[00:00:00] So welcome to the show. My name is Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in through strength training programs and my strength training membership. And today, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I am doing for summer as far as strength training goes and my recommendations for you because I know summer can be kinda stressful in that you wanna do a lot of other things besides just working out.

Vacation, beach, nice weather. Believe me, I hear you. So let's get into my thoughts and recommendations on that topic So as you may know, I live all the way up north in Finland, and unlike the rest of Europe, which is suffering, like, huge heat wave this year, we've had a pretty rainy summer so far, [00:01:00] and sunny days are few and far between.

But for sure, I have been trying to take full advantage of all the summer goings-on, and I promised myself at the beginning of the summer that if somebody asked me to do some summer fun thing, I would say yes, especially since, you know, no boyfriend right now. So, so my, uh, summer plans got kind of changed, uh, back in May when we broke up.

But anyway, so strength training. You know, normally I've been working out four days a week, usually going to the weight room and then doing a sprint interval training session in conjunction with one of my strength training sessions, and that's just been way too much to fit into my calendar right now.

And so here's what I'm doing to hold on to the muscle that I have. first thing is that I have switched over to doing full body sessions [00:02:00] primarily. Um, if I know that I have an exceptional week where I will be able to go four days a week, which I haven't yet had one of them, then I'm... I might do something different.

But right now, because I really am playing it by ear, which I don't normally do, normally I have my workouts scheduled in my calendar. I know what days I'm gonna go, but now it's been raining so much that if it's a sunny, nice day, I wanna be out of there. So I am doing full body sessions, and my plan is to go a minimum of twice a week and hopefully three days a week.

The beauty of a full body session is that you stimulate all the muscles in your body, the little bit more challenging part of it is that you can't do them two days in a row. So you do need to leave that recovery day in between. 

Getting in a few good sets has been shown to be [00:03:00] enough to maintain what you've got. So this is not the time that you're gonna break any records, but you're also not going to see the big backslide that you would if you just completely stopped strength training for the whole entire summer, which I will say I, I have a few women who have decided to go that route. And, obviously, people's situations are different. If I had an opportunity to go, I don't know, work on a cruise ship, I might not strength train for the whole summer or, you know, if I'm like hiking across Alaska. So, so obviously there are gonna be situations where, you know, you need to judge this for yourself.

But in general, I would say the best thing to do is to cut it back minimum of twice a week full body sessions. And these sessions can be fairly short. as I've mentioned before, your first working set is really the one that is going to [00:04:00] give you the most bang for your buck. That's the one that's gonna stimulate your muscles the most.

So even if you were to go in and take your strength training program and do one set of each of your exercises instead of the normal two or three sets, that would already be a very good workout, so, so you can shorten your actual workouts quite a bit, and that could help you to be able to actually fit them in to your summer.

the key is to make sure that you're training with intensity anyway, right? You do want to make sure that you're getting close to muscular failure, and that means that you only have one or two reps left in the tank when you stop. personally, if I know that I'm only training twice a week and they're gonna be two days that are kind of far apart, so maybe Tuesday and Saturday where I know I have a good [00:05:00] recovery time in between, then I will go, to one rep from failure or even to failure on some exercises to really push that as much as possible.

Because sometimes when we're training, we think we're one away from failure, but actually when we try, we're like, "Oh, okay, I could actually do two." So that's kinda my logic with that, uh, is that I'm again kind of testing where my failure, point is. It's good to practice that every now and again with, with safe exercises of course, safe exercises.

I would not do that with a barbell bench press, for example. Those are not even in my program , but I wouldn't do it with that or with like a back squat unless you've got your safeties up and, and you know how to, uh, get out from under the bar.

So a couple other thoughts on this is if you're going away on a trip for one or two weeks, really, I would not [00:06:00] stress about it. I would just... You know, you're going on a cruise, or like what I've done the past, uh, few summers is I go on a boat trip, and nowhere that we go has any place where you could actually do much more than walk.

There's certainly no gyms. It's hot. It's kinda sweaty. It's not the kind of place where you feel like, "Yeah, I really wanna work out," or you know? It just... It's just no. And, and I just, I just skip my workouts, and it's been fine. Of course, coming back, you wanna come back a little bit more gently, otherwise you might be very sore after you get back, so come back a little bit more gently.

Um, but the other thing you could do if you are somebody who feels like, "Oh, I can't, like, just sit still," because, because honestly, I've had that happen too where my body starts to get sore because I haven't worked out because it's used to working [00:07:00] out. You could even do a rubber bands training session, and if you are in my membership or in Learn to Lift with me, then please reach out to me if you want my rubber bands vacation program, and I can upload it into your account.

So the idea there, you know, rubber bands as a tool are not as good as other weights as far as being able to ensure progressive overload because obviously when you set up with your rubber band where you hold onto it will decide how much resistance you're getting from that rubber band.

And there's no way to really mark, where exactly you held it so that you could hold it at the exact same spot even for the next set, quite honestly. But when you do a rubber band workout, what you wanna do is get the resistance to be enough [00:08:00] that you can again get close to that point of failure, so you're getting the intensity in your set.

Okay? All we're trying to do is remind our bodies with that rubber band workout, remind our bodies that, hey, Lynn needs to be able to, lift heavy things, so we better hold onto that muscle. Okay? I mean, that's basically what we're trying to do with that rubber band workout. It'll be different than with the weights, but anyway...

Or if your hotel happens to have a weight room, then go ahead and go in, and you could do a session if you feel like it, right? but like said, I don't... You know, I don't like to say that, oh, you can't take two weeks off, because honestly, this is something that you are gonna be doing for the rest of your life, I hope.

So your 99-year-old self is not going to be any worse off if you [00:09:00] took a week off while you were on a cruise or two weeks off while y- while you're doing something that you really enjoy that's lowering your stress levels, you're enjoying the people around you, and, and all the things. Okay So those are my thoughts on strength training, in vacation.

So to summarize, if you're like me or you just, you know, you have access to all the equipment that you normally have, but you wanna spend more time outside and doing stuff with your friends, then just cut back on how many training sessions you're doing. So do the minimum of twice a week, and then you can even make your individual sessions shorter by cutting back on how many sets you do of each of the exercises you do.

And also, if you're in one of my programs, you could do just the primary exercises, which normally you have three sets of each. You could do two sets of each of those, and then do one set of each of the additional exercises, or only do the primary exercises. So, [00:10:00] so that's how you could, um, work that in. And then if you don't have access to the gym, so you are on a trip, right?

And if you wanna enjoy your trip, then go ahead and enjoy your trip. But if you feel like you do want to have a workout, then you can do a bands workout. And if you're in one of my programs, then just reach out to me through the app that, "Hey Lynn, I heard about your bands workout. Can you load it into my account?"

I'm happy to do that for you, and then you can do that while you're away on vacation. Okay. But I don't want you to stress about it too much because this is a marathon, not a sprint, and, you know, every now and again we have to take a week or two off. We might be sick or on vacation, right? And that is fine, so I don't want you to feel like super-duper guilty if that's the decision that you make.

And with that, I wish you a wonderful summer [00:11:00] holiday season, and I'll talk to you again next week. Happy training.