Training on holiday to avoid returning home out of shape

Let’s see how to behave on holiday to avoid making mistakes

For a professional athlete or a sports lover who practices with passion and consistency all year round, the summer holiday period could be problematic to manage in order to maintain physical fitness, without ruining the holiday for friends and relatives. Let’s find out how to train on holiday while maintaining the right balance between relaxation and physical activity.

The attitudes of athletes who train continuously throughout the year and who go on holiday for a more or less short period can be of two types: those who decide to use their holidays to train more and more than usual and those who, especially due to the heat, they opt for rest. Both attitudes can be harmful to the body and cause various problems once you return home. Let’s try to understand how to train so as not to exceed either on one side or the other.

Those who opt for relaxation

For some athletes, holidays are a major obstacle to the normal practice of physical activity. This could be more than legitimate if the athlete, especially in the last months before the break, has competed and therefore struggled a lot. A short relaxing holiday, in this case, could be the right way to fully recover your energy and resume training with greater drive and mental clarity.

If, however, there have not been particularly hard months before the holiday, resting or under-training by doing very little activity is an absolutely counterproductive attitude. Although the mind would certainly benefit, a long period without training would lead to a dramatic decline in performance upon returning home. Not to mention, then, the typical weight gain in those who are used to having a certain expenditure of energy, accentuated by the irregularity of summer meals, as well as by possible parties and dinners out.

Our advice is to stay motivated and train at least once every 5-6 days.

Those who opt for overtraining

For some athletes, however, holidays are an incentive to train more, making the most of the time they have available to do much more physical activity than usual. This is also a totally counterproductive attitude for two reasons:

• suddenly increasing the intensity and duration of training does not help improve form and performance, but leads to a real risk of injury
• returning to the usual training routine, any improvement is lost within thirty days maximum.

Our advice, if you really love the sport you practice so much that you want to practice it more than usual during your holidays, is to gradually increase your workout routine, finding the time and ways to give it greater priority throughout the year.

To train on holiday you need to find the right balance

As with everything, even when training on holiday you need to find the right middle ground, the perfect compromise to be able to maintain shape and, at the same time, enjoy the well-deserved holiday.
Once you have chosen the best times to face the heat, early in the morning and late in the afternoon, and the right route to tackle, preferably shaded, smooth and measured (so as not to exceed the kilometres), it is necessary to evaluate the training program based on to the length of the holiday, keeping in mind that it is useless to try to maintain the training rhythms to which one is accustomed.

• For holiday periods not exceeding 10 days: by preceding the holiday with a week of very intense training, it is possible to use it as a recovery break, going out for a progressive run of 10/12 kilometers at a slow-medium pace and only on the highest end, every three days.
• For holiday periods longer than 10 days: in this case it makes no sense to precede the holiday with a hard week. To maintain shape without focusing your holiday on sport, it is good to have a daily training program that alternates light jogging (6/8 km) perhaps in the company of friends and relatives who are on holiday with us, running progressive (as in the case of the short holiday) and training aimed at the activities in which the athlete is weakest.

Using these programs, taking care not to gain weight, it is possible to train on holiday without losing shape even for periods of three weeks.