4 Tips for Staying Energized on Your Trip
Staying active while travelling means staying energized while you’re stuck pulling some late nights and waiting in long lines. Travel can really wear a person down to the point where they just want to flop on their hotel bed and nap the day away.
Kind of defeats the point of going somewhere, doesn’t it? Here are a few pre-travel tips to keep you energized while you’re on the move.
1. Get your sleep schedule right before you leave
Making sure you are getting a healthy amount of sleep for several days before your trip will raise your energy levels to where they should be so you can start of right. The last thing you want to do is go into a trip already exhausted because you aren’t sleeping right.
The key thing to remember here is that it’s not just the number of hours that you sleep, but which hours you sleep that matters. This helps correctly set your circadian rhythm to wake you up in the morning feeling well-rested from a healthy combination of deep-wave and REM sleep.
2. Stay healthy
Getting sick before a trip is going to ruin whatever active plans you had, if not your entire trip. Staying well-rested is going to do wonders for your immune system, but you are also going to need to drink water and eat healthy.
Being dehydrated is actually even worse for you than being hungry, according to research from the University of Arizona. When your cells don’t have enough water, you don’t produce antibodies at the same rate, giving diseases a discrete advantage over your immune system.
Eating healthy foods that are rich in vitamins and minerals is also going to help with this process too. Making sure that your body has enough energy to function is going to make your cells stronger and harder for diseases to penetrate and will also help in the production of antibodies.
3. Exercise before you leave, carefully
If you’ve got something like a long run or a kayaking trip on the agenda, you’re going to want to make sure you aren’t going in unprepared. If you’ve been hitting the couch right after work for the past few weeks, you aren’t going to feel very good after your run.
Unless you’re doing something like a marathon, you don’t really need to train for your travel plans, you just need to make sure that you are in a generally healthy state so that you don’t fatigue too quickly or suffer from serious soreness on the second day.
4. Plan for jet lag
If we’re going far enough, one of the other reasons we feel tired when we travel is because we’ve entered a different time zone. Confusing as it may be, we measure time by the rotation of the earth, which means if you go far enough sideways on the planet, it’s going to be a different time of day.
This creates a phenomenon known as jet lag. Most of us are all too familiar with this. One great way to manage it is to try and simulate the new time zone before you arrive. Shift your bedtime and morning alarm by a few minutes each day starting a week or so before your trip. This will help your body adjust to the times you are going to need to be waking up at when you reach your destination.
Many people with jobs can only do this to a certain extent but try it to the best of your ability.
Conclusion.
So, if you’re getting ready for a long trip, the main takeaway is that you need to start planning your energy routine about a week or two before you leave. You need to be sleeping on a consistent schedule that works for you and is geared towards handling your jet lag. You need to drink water and eat healthy, as well as get moderate exercise every day to make sure your body is in the condition to move around when you travel.
Check these boxes and you’re going to find yourself energized and ready to get after it before your plane even lands.
This helps correctly set your circadian rhythm to wake you up in the morning feeling well-rested from a healthy combination of deep-wave and REM sleep.
read more travel tips
