Business Traveler and Exercise: Fitting YOU into your Suitcase

Posted by admin on Apr 29, 2011 in Blog | 62 comments

How do you incorporate exercise into your travels and keep it fun? Let’s face it. As business travelers we have business to do, which is why we left home in the first place. We focus on goals, accountability and execution. If you are the main breadwinner for the household, you carry enormous pressure on your shoulders just from that factor alone. Add the stress of performance to get paid and you have just increased the stress level tenfold. Add still more stress from having multiple employees reporting to you, and you have multiplied the stress by twenty-fold, and on and on.

The stress we have and live with is enormous, and usually is aggravated by travel delays, meeting deadlines, and giving multiple presentations to different audiences. As business people, we have to focus on our priorities and many times that doesn’t involve taking a minute to think about YOU! I invite you to pause for a minute and think about whether you have an outlet for all this stress. If you haven’t ever done this, I suggest you do it immediately. Finding a way to release pent-up stress will act as a conduit to help you improve your health outcomes significantly, meaning your chances of living longer are increased by decreasing heart disease, Diabetes, high cholesterol and all the consequences of stressful living and bad health.

For me, the biggest stress reliever, anti-depressant and lifetime companion has been exercise. Exercise has helped me through my thick and thins and has always been my fast track to overcoming many challenges in life. It is my best travel companion, but it is not without challenges.

If you are also a person that has an exercise routine, then you are likely to find a way to exercise when you travel. However, it definitely becomes an act of will or a commitment to stick to it. On the other hand, if you are someone that doesn’t have a regular routine, exercising while on the road becomes a greater challenge. Due to time constraints, tiredness and, ultimately because if you don’t enjoy it, you dread it! For many reasons, fitting in exercise definitely becomes something harder, but not impossible, to incorporate into your life.

I, for one, with my lifetime of struggles with keeping my weight down, have had exercise as my friend and ally for most of my life. I have discovered that exercise does incredible things for me and I am hooked for life. I remember attending a conference and hearing a great author and speaker by the name of Malcolm Gladwell state in his speech that running three times a week gave him one of the most pleasurable experiences he could think of. I was truly impressed with his choice of words since no one ever refers to exercise and pleasure in the same sentence, let alone with such honesty and candidness to an audience full of people.

I think that finding a form of exercise that gives us pleasure is the key to having and keeping a routine. I, too, find that exercise is a great pleasure pill. It provides me with incredible satisfaction and besides the physiological benefits, it gives me mental benefits that give me a great outlook on life, open up my mind to positive thinking, and, if I can managed to fit it in my day in the morning, will improve the rest of my day by 110%. When I exercise in the morning, I feel energized and positive all day, no matter what the challenges. I have found that the state of well-being I can achieve from a good workout outweighs the pains or discomfort I can feel during the workout. The benefits I have reaped are incredible. The psychological benefits in terms or warping depression or anxiety are amazing, too.

Bottom Line? DO IT. Find the time. Make the time. Find a way. Find what works for you. It’s worth it. You are worth it.

My very-soon-to-be-published book expands on this further with dozens of useful and practical tips of how to beat the challenges of life on the road. COMING SOON!