Whenever I travel, I make sure that I don’t give into the temptation to get fat and lazy and instead, keep working out.
As well, I do my best to eat well so I don’t feel like an absolute slug when I get back.
I recently took a short 4 day vacation to the Bahamas…
Definitely a much needed getaway from the Canadian winter and my body thanked me for exposing it to some sun!
Nutrition-wise, my fiancee and we brought some foods, which included my world-famous Cashew butter muffins as well as 6 cans of tuna…
We hit up the grocery store and bought some fruits, cheese and pickles and we were set for each day’s breakfast and lunch.
Whenever we travel, we try to sample the local cuisine – I totally do not understand the folks who go away to another country but insist on eating at McDonald’s and KFC.
Blows my mind!
In the Bahamas, conch (pronounced ‘conk’) is a local delicacy and I had it battered and fried, grilled and in conch fritters. Tasty indeed!
Training-wise, I did all of my workouts on the beach.
I simply refuse to workout in a crappy hotel gym indoors when I’ve got access to a white-sand beach with turquoise water, so a mix of bodyweight training and shadowboxing kept me busy.
Shadowboxing is one of my favourite things to do right now…
You can find me punching invisible opponents in my living room, in the elevator and any other place where I think no one is watching me.
Before I beat up the air with my favourite combos, I always loosen up my shoulders with a few different movements.
When I was in the Bahamas, I videoed a couple of my workouts and in this video, you’re going to see the movements I do to warmup my shoulders to ensure they’re loose and my hands are FAST:
There are a couple of technique pointers I want to make sure you understand so you get the most out of this routine:
- Go through a full range of motion for each exercise
- Don’t go at full speed but don’t go slow – just swing your arms around keeping them as loose as possible
- Breathe naturally throughout each of these exercises
- Marching Arms: make sure you really reach up and back with the arm using the anterior delts to lift your arm up, not your upper traps
- Reverse Flys/Shoulder Blade Pinches: focus on squeezing your rhomboids and mid/lower traps when you pinch your shoulder blades down and back
- Torso Rotations: focus on using your core (specifically your obliques) to rotate your body, not the momentum of your arms, your arms just go along for the ride
I’ll usually do this routine after I skip for 5-15 minutes.
Now I’m sure the biggest question I’ll get about this video is,
“How many reps should I do?”
For these exercises, do more not less.
How I feel gauges how many reps I do – if I need to loosen up more, then I’ll do more reps.
If I’m feeling particularly loose and limber already, then I won’t do as many.
Experiment and do as many as you feel you need that day.
If you’re at home, give it a shot right now, do some shadowboxing and tell me how you feel below!
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