Travel Gym: Strength and Conditioning on the Go
Keeping up with the oh so important strength work required to be a robust athlete while traveling around the globe can seem like a mission destined for failure, no matter what intentions you start out with. It needn't though, because with the gear available today even the lightest traveller can take just one or two items that make a full body workout possible in any setting - and if you've carted even one small piece of gear halfway around the world, it's a lot easier to find the motivation to use it! I have refined and tested many different gear combinations to create the best travel gym for me, and the one I have going now seems to be working in terms of keeping it interesting enough to want to use it, and actually keeping me strong.
The 'Adjustment Period' of Running.
The way I see it, running is like the opposite of a relationship. When you start out with a new partner, you enter the honeymoon period filled with love and excitement and immediately get rose coloured glasses firmly planted over your eyes. It seems like everything is blissfully perfect, until somewhere along the path cracks start to show. With running on the other hand, there's no way around the fact that in many ways the start sucks. Not only is breathing scarily difficult, sweat more abundant, and heart rates sky high; but you get to become reacquainted with the pain of muscles microtearing and fixing themselves on a daily basis. For me, this has meant waking up being unable to walk without the pressure and pain in my calves forcing me into a robot shuffle for the first 5 minutes of the day. Navigating stairs has once again become a mission of sweet talking my quads and hamstrings into moving as they are designed to, and I am drop-dead tired most nights.
My favourite water running sessions.
Here are some of my favourite workouts, all of which I did with a couple of minutes easy either side to make for a 60-90 minute session. I have been doing 60-90 minutes 4 times a week, but these can easily be made longer or shorter by changing number of reps to fit any time/fitness level. The rule I went by for adapting running into the water was to do similar rep times as I would for a distance (Eg 400m = 75-80 seconds, 1km = 3:20-3:30 etc), and whatever the track workout was, I would halve the rest/recovery between reps and sets as you recover quicker in the water and need more time at effort to keep your heart rate high.