Keeping your VO2 max and your HRV through a stay
A cohort of 122,007 patients published in JAMA Network Open in 2018 found all-cause mortality falling with cardiorespiratory fitness with no observed ceiling. That is the case for protecting it during a stay. It is not a case for training hard on holiday.
Detraining is slower than the anxiety around it suggests. Over ten to fourteen days, cardiorespiratory fitness barely moves if you keep some intensity, and strength barely moves at all. What does move, quickly and visibly, is everything downstream of sleep: heart rate variability, resting heart rate, appetite regulation and the quality of the sessions you do manage.
Which reverses the usual priority. The thing to protect on a stay is not the training volume. It is the sleep that makes the training possible, and after that the two or three sessions that carry the most signal.
What to hold over ten days
Two strength sessions. Forty minutes each, compound movements, loads you have handled before. This is enough to hold nearly everything and light enough that it does not eat the stay.
One session with real intensity. A handful of hard efforts with full recovery between them, on a bike, in the water or up a hill. This is the piece that protects the aerobic ceiling, and it takes twenty-five minutes.
Daily easy movement. Long walks, swimming, a slow ride. This is the volume, it costs nothing in recovery, and it happens to be the most pleasant part of any trip.
Protein at breakfast. The simplest of the four and the one most often lost abroad, where breakfast tends to be bread and fruit and dinner arrives at eleven.
What to let go
Volume for its own sake, personal bests, new movements, and the idea of coming back fitter than you left. Ten days is a hold, not a block. The Global Wellness Summit named the over-optimisation backlash among its 2026 themes, and it is a fair description of what a stay looks like when someone tries to run a forty-variable protocol on holiday with three other people waiting for them.
Ten days is a hold, not a block. Protect the sleep, keep three sessions, and let the rest go.
On the numbers falling while you are away
Heart rate variability drops in the first days of a trip for reasons that have nothing to do with your training: a short night before the flight, the flight itself, alcohol, a late dinner, heat, a different altitude. It usually returns as the sleep does. A number falling on day two is information about your travel, not about your condition.
What this changes in a stay
Two hours of structured work across ten days is a small requirement, and it is small enough that the address decides whether it happens. A gym that works in August, water you can swim in a straight line, a hill within reach, and a table with protein on it in the morning: that is the whole list, and it is the list we go through before we retain an address, villa or hotel. Where a coach makes the difference between intending and doing, we put you in touch with one.
Frequently asked
Will I lose fitness in two weeks away?
Very little, if you keep two strength sessions and one session with real intensity. Strength barely moves over that time frame, and cardiorespiratory fitness holds well when some intensity is maintained.
Why does my HRV drop when I travel?
Short nights, the flight, alcohol, late meals, heat and altitude all push it down independently of training. It usually recovers as your sleep does.
How much training is enough on a ten-day stay?
Two strength sessions of forty minutes, one short session with hard efforts, and daily easy movement. Roughly two hours of structured work across the whole stay.