Haven’t posted in a while and there’s a good reason for that, I went on a short vacation. 4 total days spent in Vegas with my wife, I mixed it up between time at the pool, site seeing and some nice dinners. I didn’t lose a ton of money either, so I’ll call the trip a success.

Whenever I mention to someone I’m going on vacation (my wife and I are DINKs and like to travel) I immediately get questions on working out/dieting on vacation, so what better place to talk about this than my blog, right…?

Starting with the diet portion: Guess what, this is a super easy explanation, I don’t diet on vacation. My take is that if you spend your money to go on vacation 1 or 2 times a year, you don’t want to leave wishing you had that 1 piece of cake after dinner, or the signature dish at a restaurant you went to, you want to leave that vacation feeling like you got everything you could out of it.

Memories are worth more than anything…

Going further, if you need to keep strict on your diet the 1-2 weeks a year you go on vacation, you’re more than likely not doing things correctly the other 50-51 weeks of the year. Think long and hard about that…

Now, there are caveats to this. If for some reason you find yourself on vacation very close to some sort of competition where you need to make weight, or even a body building competition, you’ll have to watch your diet. With that being said, I’d rather you review why you’re planning a trip so close to a competition to begin with. Understood that things happen and you may have to travel (work, death in family, etc..) but I wouldn’t consider these things vacation. I travel for work and typically do my best to eat well and find gyms somewhere.

Lifting on Vacation: I have a rule, I need to take 2 full weeks off per year from the gym. I do 4 set sessions per week, so I have 8 sessions I tell myself I have to take off, with at least 2 being consecutive. To make this simple, I plan these on my vacations so I’m not scrambling to find a gym while I’m trying to relax with my wife. This past week I didn’t lift at all and my weekly schedule looked like this:

Saturday: Still home, did a lower body ME day and went hard. Finished by hitting 30 doubles of 315 on the SSB EMOM

Sunday: Still home, worked to a heavy of single on bench then did the following EMOM. 10×3 at 245, 10×3 at 225 and 10×3 at 205

Monday – Thursday: Vacation

Friday: Off day anyway

Saturday: Back to work on normal schedule

The question normally arises “aren’t you worried about losing gains”, in short, no. The long answer, no I don’t…

You will not lose gains after a week off. Truth be told, unless you really destroyed yourself drinking, partying and eating garbage on vacation, you’ll likely be stronger when you get back and benefit from the rest. If you’re apprehensive about this just keep telling yourself your muscles don’t grow if they don’t recover. Rest is good, rest is essential.

A question may come up “what do I do if I compete?”, my advice would be to do everything you can to time your vacations to be directly after your competition, or at least within a week or two. If you can’t do this, at least try not to plan it during the peaking phase. Unless you know that where you are going has a gym that suits your needs, it can be very hard to stay on a program when you travel.

For example my wife and I go on a lot of cruises, they don’t have a real squat rack or place to bench. Because of this it would be almost impossible to run any type of powerlifting program on the boat. They do however have dumbbells that go to 80lbs, I can use these to do a ton of volume on bench press, overhead press, weighted lunges, goblet squats etc… This can at least net you a great offseason “building” workout and the change of pace can even be beneficial.

The dieting in this situation would be difficult, I’d still enjoy yourself but try and minimize the drinking to “just having a couple drinks” and try and target your cheat meals to being protein based such as a high end steak, a nice fish dish or something similar. The good thing about strength sports is that spending a week pounding back steaks has benefits…

All in all, there are things in life you can completely control, some you can manage and some you have no control over at all. If you can time your vacations right you can take that week to have all bets off and eat what you want while doing minimal exercise. If not, picture yourself in the “managing” bucket and just do the best that you can within the framework you have.

Most importantly, have fun on your vacation and be mentally present for the one’s you are traveling with. 40 years from now you won’t be laying in bed thanking god you took 2 hours to find a gym in the middle of nowhere to get a bench workout in, you will be thanking god for the time you had with your spouse, children, family etc…

You can lift and have a life, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.