Overcoming Travel Fatigue for Great Training
Trade off to major in the majors
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Weekly Program Review: Managing Travel Fatigue
Travel can be a beat down. Wake up early. Eat bad food at airports and restaurants. Sleep in foreign beds. Train in foreign gyms. It adds up to create a suboptimal setup for Highlander training.
But we can manage it to preserve our progress toward strongevity.
This past week, I had what was supposed to be a short day trip of travel, but the flight back was delayed by a few hours back. I ended up with two days of altered sleep and bad food.
We’ve all been there.
But I took four steps to minimize the impact of travel fatigue so my core bodybuilding training for an April contest wasn’t affected:
Ate more and smaller meals during the travel. The more frequent meals kept me satiated and able to avoid the temptations of travel food. It’s hard to be perfect with travel food. I ended up with some excess sodium intake, but my calories were on point and weight progression on track.
Took extra electrolytes. I use LyteShow because it doesn’t have a ton of extra sodium. My diet generally has enough of that. LMNT is good too but comes with more sodium.
Eliminated some heavier functional work I usually do (farmers carries). Instead, I did some overhead throws which are less taxing overall. I also eliminated some stability and sauna work mainly as a function of time management.
Took a 25 minute nap prior to training the day after travel. It helped me feel more refreshed to take on a hard day of leg training.
Each of these choices follow the Highlander ACT philosophy:
A Always major in the majors
C Correct excesses and deficiencies
T Trade off to manage fatigue
I majored in the majors by focusing efforts on my core bodybuilding work. I corrected deficiencies with electrolytes and naps. I made tradeoffs in my functional, stability, and sauna work to support the majors. The ACT framework will always guide you to make intelligent decisions about strongevity training.
The net result: I ended up adding weight or reps to all exercises in training the two days post travel.
Here’s my week’s training review:
In total, I spent just about 10 hours training, and I stepped up the relative intensity in my core bodybuilding training to two RIR vs three last week. RIR is reps in reserve, i.e. how close you go to failure in each set.
The Fatigue Monitor
Overall fatigue is about the same as last week — 24 out of 30 — outside of the travel management. No need to make any major changes to programming.
As I get closer to the April bodybuilding show and calories become more restricted, I expect to need to pull out some more of the non-core longevity efforts (some functional, zone 5 most likely) to make sure I can manage the reduced energy effects.
Changes for Next Week
Back to normal efforts on the functional, stability, and sauna work. See how that impacts fatigue. And I plan to experiment with doing relatively light weight sandbag to shoulder in case I get the crazy urge to do a strongman competition on short notice.
Until next week. Stay stronger for longer.
