Why I Never Hit the Gym and What I do Instead

I want fitness in my life but I don’t want exercise to take up too much of my life. So I never hit the gym but I like to maintain a certain physique.

“There’s a lot of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health that they haven’t the time to enjoy it.” -Josh Billings

For the entirety of my career, I had a rigorous workout routine which meant much of my free time was spent at various gyms. Routines that can only be done at gyms for the equipment.

I looked great, felt great and was in peak physical condition. But at a cost of “living” and leisure time.

It was work, training, workout and repeat.

My profession didn’t exactly allow for much social or fun time, but my exercise curriculum reduced that to nearly zero. It consumed what little free time I had in my life.

So after I retired and started vagabonding to travel the world as a lifestyle, hitting up gyms on a regular basis was not possible, nor did I want that in my new life.

If I did want to continue with such a strict curriculum on the road, my travels and lifestyle would have been dictated by the need to find a gym, get a decent membership and schedule time for it. Mind you, this is while erratically jumping cities and countries.

After retiring I had no direct need to be in such optimal physical condition, but I did want to be fit and strong.

With the absence of proper gyms, I can never reach my former physical conditioning but that’s okay.

So instead I started doing something simple, hardly time consuming and incidentally a seamless part of my new lifestyle while still being in great shape, this is what I do:

I walk a lot. Obviously I don’t have a car when traveling. I walk anywhere if it’s remotely feasible. This burns calories and keeps the weight off while being passively active.

As for more strenuous workouts, other than the action sports and activities I happened to cross by, I do a session or two of 100 pushups every other day and about 500 sit-ups between days. But, even this is not done religiously, just if I have a few minutes.

As for diet, it’s also not nearly as strict as it used to be. I try to eat healthy and at most, seek foods high in protein. But again, it’s not always easy when my life is travel.

Before, it was about constructing and building my body at a high cost of time and effort, now it’s relatively easy maintenance with minimal management.

My advice to you is to first reach a maintainable level of fitness and physique that you’re happy with and find a basic and easy to follow regimen to keep it.

[The featured photo was taken on a jungle bridge on the island of Penang, Malaysia.]