Staying Healthy While Traveling – Garage Strength

What's up everybody this is Dane Miller from Garage Strength. I am cruising at 38000 feet in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner en route to Bangkok Thailand. I just left Tokyo where I was coaching at the adaptation camp for the Senior World Weightlifting Championships. I am coaching 67k athlete, Jordan Wissinger, and he will be competing in 3 days!


We're heading to Thailand right now. We've got about four and a half hours left before we land. We're flying at five hundred sixty miles an hour at 38000 feet to just put that in perspective. I think Mt. Everest is twenty-nine thousand feet. So we're flying at 38 so another 10000 feet plus 560 miles an hour. So it's pretty crazy to think about that. But we've got about a six-hour flight so we're about an hour and a half into it. I wanted to go over a couple of questions regarding Dane “How do you stay ripped on the road.” And I think that first I just want to address one thing. I'm not ripped. I've got about 12 percent body fat I'm not I don't have a six-pack. Not shredded by any means. Not like these weightlifters that are surrounding me are all chiseled out of granite, but I think it's an important topic to cover because what you're eating while you're traveling and what you're habits are and what your sleep is like are in general shouldn't really change right? Your whole goal should be that you focus on good recovery and that you are able to provide enough nutrition and enough recovery for your body so that whatever you're doing on your travels you can still feel good and happy and satisfied.


The hardest part for me while I'm traveling is generally sleep, but I'm lucky where I've got Earth Fed Muscle. I travel with all the essentials, 30 scoops of protein, protein pancakes, collagen, creatine, essentials, and ZMA. I think that's the first step when you are traveling. You've got to set up your supplements so that your routine doesn't change too much. This is key for me. I've got to have my creatine because it's one of the best ways to preserve lean muscle mass when you're in a calorie deprived diet.


I've got to have my ZMA so that I can sleep and at least get quality sleep. So I might only have five and a half hours of sleep but my quality is going to be quite a bit better than if I didn't have it. I like to have my earth fed essentials so I can have all my great vitamins and minerals and stay healthy so I can handle the fact that I am traveling around the world twice in the matter of 23 days.


So I think it's important that all of the supplements that you can use that you have them in line to sort of keep that immune system from being compromised and that's where collagen can come in to play. What I do is I mix my collagen in a Ziploc bag with my protein so it's actually mixed together and then I have my creatine in another bag and then I've got my ZMA and essentials and in their pill bottles so it's easy to travel with and then if I've got room I will bring my protein pancakes. I think that just having that little bit of preparation immediately puts me into a good mindset where I know I'm going to be taking care of myself nutritionally. This then sets me up to have everything set up no matter what country I'm traveling to, I will always know what I'm going to eat. I ask myself, are they going to have rice? Meat? Or Fruit? Just so I can gauge my diet, But even en route to that travel I'm always going to think about the fact that you know caffeine and coffee are gonna help prevent me from eating tons of crap. The caffeine can decrease my appetite. So I really use that to my advantage.


Plus I love coffee so I have seven or eight cups so I'm doing work on a long flight. But even with my meal that I just had here flown on the 787 on Nippon Airways we had a chicken burger. I didn't end up eating the spaghetti though. I had some red wine so I wanted to stay a little bit healthy with the red wine and then they offered Haagen-Dazs ice cream which I believe is the best commercial ice cream that you can buy. So I had to eat it cause you know I have to have Haagen-Dazs. 


It's one of those things that when I'm traveling I don't try and restrict myself so much that I'm just constantly thinking about it, but what I try and do is set myself up for the most success and then wherever I am I try and exercise and get some fitness in and go for walks and try and take in the city and try and take in the sights around and try and just be normal as much as I can. I like to get outside, get some vitamin D, get some good breathing and get down by the beach before the day really begins and try and maintain a semblance of normalcy so you can hold your health while you're traveling.


I just think it does start a little bit with a supplementary regimen because it makes it easier to hold yourself accountable with your nutrition and with your food sources and then and then it also helps you maintain a steady workout regimen where I might just do one hundred clap push-ups or a hundred bodyweight squats with 100 v-ups and stuff like that, and always remember that it's OKAY to do stuff like that. I think that that's one of the biggest keys behind staying healthy staying lean and staying happy while you're traveling it's hard for me to stay happy on travel because I miss my children and my wife so much.


If I'm eating well and I'm getting decent sleep it makes it a little bit easier for me to handle the fact that I'm not with my family and so I think that's the overriding lesson as people who are traveling. You've got to set up your expectations that they don't need to be crazy, they don't need to be outrageous goals. Wake up in the morning make your workout a 15-minute workout. It's OKAY to just walk it's OKAY to just do bodyweight stuff and recognize that once you get back home you're going to get back on your regular routine.


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