Should You Workout On Vacation?

happierhealthierwiser

Jan 12

Written By Adam Fisher

Takeaway Points:

You don’t need to workout while on vacation.
The amount of time people generally take for vacations (one to two weeks) is not long enough to lose your progress. Even if you do, it’s much easier to get back to your pre-vacation numbers than to get there in the first place.
Vacations are supposed to be fun, relaxing, and restorative. You’re not supposed to be going through your normal routine and habits. Taking a break means that you’ll (hopefully) come back to your normal life with enough energy and motivation to make it through until your next break.
Traveling, or even vacation days at home, are often more physical than an average desk job. You’re still moving! However, if it doesn’t feel like enough, a simple workout once a week while on vacation is enough to keep your gains up.

I get this question a lot - what should I do for working out while I’m on vacation?

The short answer: probably nothing. But of course, I’ll go into the much longer answer, and the reasoning behind it, here.

You Probably Won’t Lose Anything

Most people don’t go on vacation for very long - a week, a week and a half, maybe two weeks at most. This time is insufficient to cause any significant loss of strength or muscle mass - while it’s easy to believe that you will lose something, this is mostly a misconception.

Further, as I’ve explored elsewhere in my writing, it takes significantly less effort to maintain a quality than to build it in the first place. There’s no clear limit, but it’s generally accepted that a training volume of about ¼ to ⅓ of your previous training volume is sufficient to maintain strength and muscle mass for a long time, so long as intensity is kept high. This means that if you’re able to get in at least 1 workout a week, hitting all major movements significantly heavy, you’re basically able to keep up your strength for a pretty long period of time.

This enables us to be strategic with our training - for example, taking time off of focusing on one quality to focus on another related or still useful quality in the offseason. A powerlifter may focus 100% on strength leading into a competition, but then focus more on building muscle mass or changing weight classes in the offseason, where it’s less likely to be a disruption. During those offseason phases, switching to a maintenance level of volume for other qualities becomes a useful way to minimize your effort while retaining the fruits of your hard work.

Likewise, when it comes to a week off for vacation, you’re not likely to lose much. A single week isn’t enough to cause much dropoff, and even if you were concerned about that dropoff, you could basically make up for it by just doing 1 tough workout per week or so. Which brings us to the next point -

It Doesn’t Take That Long To Regain Lost Progress

Much in the same way that I’ve written about how a few bad days won’t ruin a diet so long as they don’t derail you from returning to your habits, the reality is that a few days off won’t have much of an impact on your training, so long as you return to your habits afterwards.

In fact, there’s a well-known effect in which, when training for a quality that you previously had, but lost, you retrain much quicker - this phenomenon is often referred to as “muscle memory”. While the exact mechanisms behind muscle memory aren’t 100% clear, it’s clear that by simply returning to activity, you’ll quickly regain any strength or muscle mass that you lost. In short, while you can potentially lose a bit of strength or muscle mass with a longer break, it basically evens out to nothing because you then get to experience faster gains until you return to your previous levels.

This is a good thing because it means that, as above, we can be strategic about our training. If you want to take a week off, that’s fine, and you can plan on diverting your energy to focusing on other training goals, resting up to maximize your recovery, or simply focusing on other things in your life. Knowing that you’ll be able to more quickly recover after the time off enables you to rest easy knowing that you’re not actually losing anything.

It’s Important To Enjoy Yourself

The last, and in my mind most important, argument for not working out on vacation is just this: that it’s better to take some time off, rest, relax, and enjoy yourself.

Life is not about constant stressors and depriving yourself of rest, recovery, and relaxation - optimal performance in any field is about pushing yourself hard and then giving yourself time to recover in order to optimally adapt to prepare for future stressors. Without recovery, stressors simply accumulate until burnout, injury, or breakdown becomes inevitable.

Vacations are an important time to relax and enjoy yourself, and because of this, they represent a huge break from your normal habits. As a result, I’ve found that many clients ask me beforehand for workout plans, and then when they actually go on vacation, they find that they have no motivation to follow through. This is a good thing! When our normal routines are disrupted, we don’t have the habits that regularly keep us moving towards our self-improvement goals, and this makes it much harder to actually go through with anything. But this also helps us to prioritize destressing, relaxing, and adapting to our new environment.

In many ways, vacation can also be physically exhausting. Anyone who goes on a plane trip can tell you that their step count increased drastically due to needing to haul themselves around the airport. Sightseeing in major cities typically involves tons of walking to and from public transit, meandering around parks and museums, and so on. Camping and hiking trips involve a lot more movement than you typically experience in a sedentary desk job.

As a result, very often you’re already going to be exhausted enough from everything else, and having the time and energy to try out a workout (often with unfamiliar equipment) is very unlikely.

It’s Not Worth It

In short, no, it’s generally not worth it to plan to workout much on vacation. Maybe a single workout per week, just to ensure maximal retention of strength and muscle and a smooth return to activity when you’re back, can be doable. However, attempting to maintain a full workout schedule is generally an absolutely bonkers-terrible idea.

Instead, it’s best to strategize around the holidays in advance. If you’re on a strict training cycle, maybe shorten it or speed it up so that you can peak before you go on holiday, and then you can simply treat that period as a deload between training phases. In this way, it’s 100% factored in and doesn’t impact your plans at all.

As above, almost nobody is actually able to stick to a strict workout routine while on vacation or holiday, and I don’t think they should. Rest is a natural and good thing, and trying to turn your rest periods in more work kind of defeats the purpose.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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