#186: ✈️ Maintaining Your Routine While You Travel
Tips for Your Summer Travel
Hey friends,
When I went to Athens in May for The World Beautiful Business Forum, I completely was thrown off of my routine - exercise, eating, everything.
Here I am, a longevity expert, and I couldn’t hold it together over a 5 day conference.
It made me think about what I usually do to stay fit, eat healthy, and sleep properly when I travel. I also thought back to the professionals that I’ve interviewed and I wanted to make a practical list for you, and for myself, the next time I’m at a conference with 12+ hour programming each day.
Here’s what I’ve found. Enjoy!
Cheers,
Nina
💬 In this note:
✈️ Maintaining Your Routine While You Travel
📚 Brimstone
⚡️ “Go to Sleep” - Claude
#186: 💪🏼 Maintaining Your Routine While You Travel
When we travel, we have many things that throw off your routine - jetlag, early morning meetings, late night social events for work, or staying up late and sleeping in because you’re enjoying your holiday.
I’ve interviewed several professionals about what they do to stay healthy and fit on the road, and how they recover from the grind of constant travel.
Fighting Jet-Lag
Sleep Flying East, Stay Awake Going West
When traveling west, stay awake on the flight. Most Europe-to-US flights take off in the morning, so you’ve already slept. Stay awake on the plane, land in the afternoon in the US, and do your best to stay awake until at least 8pm/9pm local time before going to bed.
The exception to this rule is if you are traveling west and you cross the international date line, for example flying from California to Australia. In this case, sleep on the plane, you will land in the very early morning in Australia, and you’ll need the rest.
Eat Before and After the Flight. Avoid Plane Food.
You want your circadian rhythm in sync with the new timezone, and eating is one of the fastest ways to kickstart that adjustment.
Your first meal after landing should align at a proper mealtime in the local timezone - should be at breakfast, lunch or dinner.
When you arrive at your destination, have a coffee to keep you awake until bedtime. Take melatonin to fall asleep and stay asleep. I take 10mg of melatonin to fall asleep and get a full 7-8 hours of sleep in the new timezone.
One thing I noticed for me, is that the bigger timezone gaps, the easier I find the adjustment. Long-hauls like LA to Sydney, or Lisbon to San Francisco are more manageable than two- or three-hour shifts like Lisbon to Athens, or Vegas to NYC.
Get Off the Plane and Straight To the Gym
This is one of my secret hacks. On a redeye flight from the US west coast to east coast, I usually land at 5am - too early to check in to the hotel, and too early to even meet anyone for breakfast.
So I book an early morning workout class to attend right when I land.
The perks: lockers for your luggage, showers, blow dryers, etc. But more than logistics, it kick-starts your metabolism, gets your muscles moving after hours in a seat and mentally signals to your brain that the flight is over.
You arrive into the day already feeling like yourself.
I also book the earliest morning fitness classes if I wake up too early in the new timezone.
How Formula E World Champion Lucas Di Grassi Fights Jet-Lag
When I interviewed Luca di Grassi, Formula E World Champion, Formula 1 and WEC Le Mans driver, he told me that his jetlag has actually gotten worse with age. And yet, he still has to fully adjust within 2-3 days while on tour driving.
To adjust quickly, he takes probiotics and prebiotics for jet-lag, specifically because travel disrupts the microbiome. Pre-/Probiotics are an easy thing to pack and a genuinely underrated hack.
I’d added my own version to this so that when I arrive somewhere new, I always find a big healthy salad for my first real meal. It’s simple, helps with digestion, and makes you feel like you’re taking care of yourself when everything else feels disrupted.
JJ Virgin’s Travel-as-Lifestyle ToolKit
JJ Virgin, triple board-certified nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer, doesn’t treat travel as an exception to her routine. She told me in our recent interview that she built her routine around the fact that she’s always traveling.
She chooses hotels specifically based on the gym quality. Full stop.
She has a dedicated travel workout plan that divides the body into 4 parts - upper push, upper pull, hip/thigh hinge, power core - so that she can train anywhere and with whatever equipment there is available.
If she can’t make it to the gym - like right before she gets on stage for a talk, she does her hotel room circuit: up-downs, jumping jacks, and air squats. It just takes twenty minutes and really counts.
For timezone adjustment, she takes creatine HCL (not monohydrate). The monohydrate form causes bloating where the HCL form does not and absorbs better at lower doses. She takes four doses on heavy travel days versus her usual one or two doses. She described a recent trip where she went from the Amazon → Egypt → New York → LA and the creatine HCL, she said, is what kept her functional.
On a recent trip to Bali, she stopped over in South Korea specifically to adjust time zones. At the hotel gym, she found people from age 30 to age 100, all in matching PE outfits, just going about their workout like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because, for them it was. And that’s the normalization we are missing.
Whether it’s Lucas adjusting his microbiome between Tokyo and Shanghai, or JJ choosing a hotel by its squat rack, the people who maintain their health while traveling don’t just wing it.
They build systems so that the decision is already made before the jet-lag hits.
You don’t need to be a Formula E driver or a fitness hall of famer to do this.
Pick one thing, like a travel workout you can do in less than 30 minutes (I love Kayla Itsines workouts!), a supplement you pack without thinking, a rule about what you eat when you land, and make it automatic. The routine doesn’t have to survive the trip perfectly, showing up matters the most.
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📚 Book of the Week
Brimstone by Callie Hart
Rating: ★★★★★
It’s summer and we’re back with the fairy smut.
Fae-vampire hybrid Queen Saeris Fane and Kingfisher are back for a sequel. The book launches right in, and if you read Quicksilver a while ago (for me over a year ago, it was the BOTW #153).
Quicksilver ends with a massive cliffhanger after Saeris has this wild, otherworldly encounter with the gods…and they expect you to remember all of that when you’re thrown back into this world, trying to remember characters, plots, and chaos.
About 15% in my brain started to settle back down and remember a thing or two.
So my biggest recommendation is to read them back-to-back if you can! Or at least re-read the last chapter of Quicksilver before launching into Brimstone.
⚡️ Check This Out
Claude often tells me to go to sleep, or to stop working.
As per several Reddit users, they are also getting these suggestions to “get some rest.”
Some people like Claude’s commitment to self-care, while others find it intrusive, annoying or confusing. Because the worst part is that Claude does not seem to know what time it is.
Often I get messages telling me to “get some rest” first thing in the morning when I continue the tread of a conversation.
Good news: Anthropic is looking to fix the quirk.
However, I have to admit, when I run out of tokens it perfectly aligns with lunch or dinner time and a few hours later the tokens reset and I think that is really helpful for my mental health - thanks Claude.
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