T180 Lady’s Summer Survival Guide – Hot off the press!
Between traveling, house guests, parties, etc it’s hard to keep up with your fitness and nutrition over the summer. Difficult times can be used either for making excuses or making plans. As the saying goes: Tough times don’t last, but tough ladies do, and here’s how a tough minded T180 lady gets it done over the summer months:
The T180 Lady’s Summer Survival Guide:
1. Be firm and flexible: don’t let your preferences get in the way of the making the essential things happen. You may prefer having your personal training sessions more spread out in a week, but if your travel schedule requires training on consecutive days or more sessions per week than usual that’s OK. You’ll probably be extra sore, but better to be extra sore than to skip 25-100% of your sessions.
Additionally, you may prefer in studio sessions, but your travel schedule requires you to use Zoom for some of them; and that’s OK. Everyone’s knee jerk reaction to non-ideal circumstances is “I can’t,” but that’s almost never true. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and we’re here to help make it happen (captain).
2. Use layaway: When I go to the beach I’m usually going to gain 3-5 pounds (don’t ask). When I try the “credit card approach” and say “I’ll lose that when I get home,” I usually don’t pay the bill on time. However, losing those 3-5 pounds before the beach (layaway) keeps me from being frustrated or annoyed with myself for weeks or months after vacation. The same is true for a nice dinner out – we’re usually more diligent about “saving” those calories beforehand than we are about repaying them later.
3. Shake it up: eating right is pretty tough when you are traveling. One of the simplest work arounds is using a protein shake + fresh fruit as one of your daily meals. A protein shake just requires cold water and a shaker cup, and is the lowest calorie way to get half of your day’s protein needs.
Fresh fruit is a low calorie way to get more fiber, vitamins, and some carbs to help you feel full for a long time. (Neither carbs nor fruit make people fat.) A protein shake and fresh fruit will never be the best tasting option available, but it’s good enough. More importantly, it checks a lot of boxes while freeing up calories for the things you’d prefer eating later in the day.
4. Step it up: vacations should be a change of pace and sorta-relaxing, or, at the very least, not be overly scheduled so you’re rushing from appointment to appointment… if you wanted to be hurried and pressed for time, you could’ve stayed home lol.
The slightly slower pace should allow you more time to use your feet – walk places. Take walks to run errands, go out, or for no reason at all (especially without either one of you bringing a phone, so you all can interact with each other). Getting your step count at least 20% higher than what it is at home will go a long way to boosting your mood, connecting with others, and offsetting some indulgence. (Obviously, you can always wear a vest too!)
5. Keep your eyes open: getting buried in sand at the beach is all fun and games until it comes to the head. Our instincts to keep the sand out of our eyes is wise elsewhere too, like keeping clothing with a real waistband in your rotation, or keeping an eye on the scale so you don’t have an “oh shit!” moment in the fall when you try to put on your favorite pair of jeans. Problems are always easiest to solve when they’re small, but you need to know that you’ve got an issue to address.
We hope you take these tips from the Summer Survival Guide and make it the most enjoyable summer yet!
And if you are looking to avoid gaining 10lbs on vacation: check this out: 3 (more) Practical Ways to Keep off Weight this Summer