Healthy Trucker Tips: How to Stay In Shape While Trucking

What if your job was making you more and more unhealthy every day? For truckers, this is an unfortunate reality. The combination of a sedentary job and long hours often make it seem impossible to stay active and healthy. Don’t worry, though: there are many easy secrets to becoming a healthy trucker, no matter how […]

What if your job was making you more and more unhealthy every day?

For truckers, this is an unfortunate reality. The combination of a sedentary job and long hours often make it seem impossible to stay active and healthy.

Don’t worry, though: there are many easy secrets to becoming a healthy trucker, no matter how long you’re on the road each day.

Keep reading to discover our top tips for how to stay in shape while trucking?

Importance of Breakfast

Food plays a big part in how healthy (or unhealthy) you are when you’re on the road. We’ve got plenty of food-related tips, and it all starts with you focusing on breakfast.

When you’re focusing on your schedule, it’s tempting to skip breakfast, or maybe just eat something unhealthy. However, your trucker diet should include breakfast items like protein bars, fruit, vegetables, milk, and whole grains.

Some research suggests that you’re better off if this is your biggest meal of the day. It gets you started off right with a healthy meal and keeps you from getting overly hungry later on in the day!

Get a Hobby

It’s an open secret that stress plays a major role in the health lives of truckers. Feeling stressed out can contribute to everything from unhealthy binge-eating to pain in your back and muscles.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this: take up a road-friendly hobby! Things like podcasts while you drive and books while you’re parked can keep stress away while making life on the road a little less boring.

Don’t forget to take advantage of local entertainment in the places where you stop. Injecting fun into the drive is a great way to reduce stress and make your days that much healthier.

Small Exercise Goals

Truckers often complain about how difficult it is to get any exercise on the road. After all, your truck doesn’t have a gym, and you likely travel too much (125,000 miles per year on average) to take advantage of an actual gym membership.

However, you can still embrace a more active lifestyle by setting small exercise goals for yourself. For instance, fifteen minutes of vigorous exercise a day can help you shed fat and stress in equal amounts.

Just use common sense to develop exercises that are compatible with your mobile lifestyle. You can shadowbox in the truck, for instance, and jog at truck stops. And there’s always room for lightweight equipment like a jump rope!

Healthy Snacks

Life on the road means eating a lot of snacks. And these snacks are what lead to the “fat trucker” stereotype, as it’s easy and tempting to snack on unhealthy things like bags of potato chips.

However, with some preparation, you can give your snack routine a healthy overhaul. Substitute those chips for things like nuts and string cheese. And jerky is surprisingly healthy–low-carb and filling.

There are plenty of other options, including hummus and veggies or yogurt. Even dark chocolate is good in small doses: you don’t have to sacrifice flavor to have healthier snacks, and eating snacks in small doses will keep you from eating too much at regular mealtimes.

Reach Out to Friends and Family

You know how we talked earlier about stress affecting your health? There’s another possible solution to this, and it’s as easy as picking up the phone.

Life as a trucker can be very lonely at times: you don’t get a whole lot of human contact, and this can cause stress on its own while also contributing to stress-related eating.

However, regular contact with your friends and family can reduce this stress. This may mean calling at the end of the drive, or using a wireless headset to talk while you’re driving (just make sure you don’t get distracted and are familiar with local laws concerning wireless headsets and driving).

Log Your Fitness

Many people end up overthinking how to lose or maintain weight. At the end of the day, it’s just math: you want to burn as many (or more) calories as you take in each day.

A simple way to do this is to begin keeping a log of your nutrition and exercise. You can do this by hand, although there are a number of phone apps that make the process much easier.

And a good side effect of logging what you eat is that it will make you more conscious about the food you consume when you’re out on the road!

Focus On Water

In terms of nutrition, we’ve focused a lot of attention on what you eat. However, it’s just as important to your trucker diet that you focus on what you are drinking.

Many truckers drink a lot of soda on the road. This gives you a lot of unhealthy, empty calories. And even diet soda can cause you to eat more food than your body actually needs.

Try replacing that soda with water. For maximum health, you should try to drink at least sixty-four ounces of water a day. This is good for your body and also helps you feel more full, reducing the need to eat too much during the day.

As a final bonus, drinking lots of water will help you stay more alert while you’re driving!

The Power of Routine

The final ingredient to becoming a healthy trucker is getting a good amount of sleep each night. However, many truckers find this difficult after a long day of driving on the road.

Fortunately, there’s a solution to this: you need to give yourself a regular “pre-sleep” routine. A great example is turning off your laptop or phone and reading for ten to twenty minutes (or longer) each night.

This will help you fall asleep. And as an added bonus, you’ll learn something new each night!

Healthy Trucker: The Bottom Line

Now you know the secrets to being a healthy trucker. But do you know how to find the best trucking jobs in the industry?

At CDL Hunter, we are all about pairing the best drivers with the jobs that are best for them. To see how we can help you find a whole new route, come fill out the driver application today!