Maintaining good health may sometimes be a challenge, even if you follow a smooth daily routine. Things get even worse when your routine involves steering the wheel, especially when it’s your job. It’s difficult to keep your mental and physical health in favorable condition when you spend most of your week on the road, and the difficulty lies in the risk of getting lost even if you know the route.
We have collected the most time-proven and effective recommendations for how to keep yourself in good shape and choose the right “route” for your health.
Tip 1: Consume Healthy Food
One of the cornerstones of staying healthy on the road is maintaining proper nutrition. Take some good time to think through your daily nutrition plan (yes, you need to have one), and make sure it includes foods that have as many categories of vitamins as possible. Next, do your best to have balanced daily nutrition – it’s important that you have several meals a day and develop a set meal intake schedule that you will stick to on a daily basis.
Tip 2: Surround Yourself with the Things You Like
As you step on it down the road, your trip is likely to get tedious and even irritating, depending on the wide variety of the conditions that encompass the transportation process. Thus, you need to spice up your trip with whatever could make you feel good and is available for realization. Here are the attributes that most truck drivers avidly use to spice up their important transportation mission:
- Music
- Films (only for those who are not easily distracted)
- Travel buddies
- Stops at favorite roadside bars
- Podcasts
Gracefully gliding down the snowy road to Chris Rea’s “Looking for the Summer” is a great way to stay focused and calm, and having your favorite film stream on the tablet screen will keep you uplifted and more energetic.
Tip 3: Get Enough Sleep
Obvious as it might sound, good sleep prevents a lot of unwanted conditions that drivers can develop. Make sure you follow a properly created sleep schedule, and don’t miss out on letting your brain have some rest. Working as a truck driver requires a lot of mental and physical effort, while maintaining an optimized sleep schedule.
Tip 4: Consider Working Out
Working out in between your rides will help you stay fit, both physically and mentally. Don’t shy away from warming up your body and giving it a break from the discomforting posture when you are behind the wheel.. Once you have decided to break bad into workouts, make sure to develop a pattern for the activity – many things come down to scheduling, yes. Generate a schedule for your workouts, and think of exact exercises that’ll suit you best: you can either adhere to the exercises you loved at high school or look up some verified YouTube sports bloggers offering effective exercises that you could benefit from.
Tip 5: Make Sure You Stay Hydrated
Hydration is an essential part of everyone’s life, let alone the hectic lives of truckers. To stay healthy when on the road, you need to follow hydration procedures, which will help you get rid of toxins and metabolic waste from your body. Try to have at least half a gallon of water a day to maintain optimized hydration, and you will notice drastic changes in the way your organism functions.
Tip 6: Work on Your Posture
As was mentioned earlier, drivers are forced to put their bodies in harm’s way as regards the posture they take when driving. To avoid dramatic problems with your back, you need to take measures aimed at making your seat as comfortable as possible. One of such measures would be getting a quality driver seat, like a seat equipped with lumbar support.
The Bottom Line
A trucker’s occupation is demanding, no matter how romanticized it may be. Behind all the fascination and adventure, there’s always a little challenge hovering over drivers who sometimes struggle to keep their physical and mental fitness in proper condition. To keep yourself in good shape when on the road, you have to follow pretty simple and generic rules that would prevent you from losing yourself, which is the opposite of what the line from one iconic song suggests: “You better lose yourself in the music” – in your case, the best way for you is to stay yourself as you hit the road, with music keeping you from getting lost!