My husband and I love to go on relaxed, chilled vacations, but we also like to stay active. Over the past few years, we’ve perfected our plans, and we recently spent ten days in Sweden, Estonia and Finland exploring, relaxing, working out, sightseeing and generally enjoying ourselves! These vacations require quite a bit of planning, as unless we plan for activity and movement, it isn’t likely to happen. With this in mind, here are some of our tips:

Accommodation

When looking for hotels, we always choose accommodation which has a gym or pool. I’m very much a runner and my husband likes hiking so unless the weather is extremely hot or cold, we can usually get our cardio completed outside, but the strength work is a little harder.  We’ve found that by choosing a hotel that has a great gym, we look forward to trying out the new equipment, and it’s easy to build it into our schedules.  If we’re staying in an AirBnB, we usually plan 30 min bodyweight workouts for our strength sessions. 

The location of our accommodation matters, so we look for places that have sidewalks and/or trails nearby. I often go onto Google Maps and do a little look around the area to ensure that it looks viable and safe for running.  During this most recent vacation we stayed at three hotels, all of which were in convenient, city-centre locations. Two of them had gyms, and one didn’t, so we made good use of the weights while we had them, and ran outside when we didn’t.

If you’re interested in learning more, here are the hotels we stayed at this summer. They were all lovely!

Stockholm: Hotel C. Amazing breakfasts, great gym with recommended running routes, opposite the train station directly to the airport, centrally located and super helpful staff.

Tallinn: My Hotel Beautiful hotel right in the middle of the Old Town. No gym, but really centrally located and lots of local running routes. Great breakfasts and helpful staff.

Helsinki: Hotel Indigo Perfect location, spacious room, no breakfast, but lots of local places within walking distance and easy to run in the parks nearby.

Scheduling

We like to move every day, whether that be through walking, running, going to the gym, or some other activity. Before we arrive anywhere we loosely plan out our itineraries in a spreadsheet, and work out which days will be more active outside e.g. going on a walking tour of a city, or a hike into the mountains, and then plan our gym workouts and runs around that. This summer’s trip included a lot of city walking and running, a little hiking, some church tower climbing, and a few trips to the gym. If we had a particularly active day, then we took that as an exercise rest day.

Route Planning

There’s enough to say about this for a whole blog post on its own, so I’ll just mention that we plan routes ahead of time, sometimes by looking on Google Maps and choosing routes of towns and cities that will give us an opportunity to see the sights and take photos, and sometimes by looking on websites such as Strava to work out the most popular routes in the area. We also recently found the site ‘Great Runs’, which we found really helpful.  If you’re staying in a hotel, they can often recommend safe and interesting running/walking routes. This was the case with our hotel in Stockholm, which had a map on the wall of running routes to try – it’s so helpful when hotels do this!

Timing

Timing is everything! If we’re planning on working out, we try to get up early and get it done. We’ve learned the hard way that once we’re out of the house and exploring, we’ll likely be too tired when we get home to do anything other than lie on the bed, or go out for dinner and drinks.  Our gym workouts aren’t long. Sometimes they are just 30 mins, but they keep our routines going, and set us up well for the day ahead.  In general we eat a banana/cereal bar before our workouts and then head to the hotel breakfast after we’ve finished working out.

How do you plan your vacations to ensure that you’re active? Are there any tips you can share with readers, or that I could add to this post?