Six and a bit months in Southeast Asia: fitness, food and finding balance

F&TF is excited to be back in Blighty

When I set off for Southeast Asia, I thought I had a decent plan: stay active, work remotely, eat well, and experience as much as possible. Six months later, I can safely say that plan held up – mostly. Along the way, I first crawled and then flew through gym sessions in 30-degree heat, adapted to new cuisines that laugh in the face of high-protein diets, and learned more about balancing travel, relationships, and fitness than I ever imagined.

Fitness meets culture: gyms and group workouts

Finding a gym in Southeast Asia is a workout in itself. I think I researched 150 or so in person or online before going – scanning images for the types of kit they had and reviews for expected entry fees, which varied from 50p per session to nearly £20. The average price I paid was £2.50 for a day pass, and across the 40 or so gyms I visited, there was no universal standard.

Some halls were huge with brand-new equipment but no air conditioning. Others were boxes with everything you needed, and then the slickest gyms could rival London’s finest but were, understandably, overstocked with shirtless Westerners. The local gyms were often a gamble. Picture squat racks that wobbled if you so much as looked at them, or custom machines seemingly designed by a god-level entity who knew exactly how to squeeze and stretch your target muscles – and then work their antagonists equally well. In Vietnam, for instance, I found custom two-in-one leg extension and curl machines that were close to perfect for movements.

The playlists? Pure chaos. One moment it’s ballads, the next it’s 2000s emo hits and hard rave. But when you’ve paid pennies to train and the owner’s personally welcomed you, you make it work, even when you're sweating through your elbows and Red Bulls are cheaper than bottled water.

Walking to the gyms, I fell in love with how locals navigated their fitness activities. In Vietnam, group exercise is a community event. At dawn, parks fill with people doing tai chi, da cau (a shuttlecock-kicking game), or even tug of war. In the evenings, along the beachfronts of Koh Phangan and Nha Trang, older and younger groups attended outdoor dance classes. In Da Nang, under the Dragon Bridge, at least three troupes worked on their own routines. Where group exercise positively correlates with better mental health outcomes the people of Thailand and Vietnam in particular are well ahead of the curve and look to have been for years.

Working remotely: a digital nomad trial run

One of my goals was to see if the “digital nomad” lifestyle suited me. The answer? Sort of. Time zones were surprisingly manageable for clients but a nightmare for social media: if I posted in my mornings or evenings, engagement tanked; if I posted at UK-friendly times, the reach was sometimes just a tenth of what I'd had in Britain.

On the whole, though, with affordable SIM cards in every country – often outperforming my GiffGaff SIM in the UK for general connectivity and 5G access – surprisingly reliable Wi-Fi, and the freedom to work from a riverside café in Luang Prabang or atop a jungle canopy in Da Lat, the upsides for someone who likes variety, enjoys strong coffee, and only needs a laptop for their job are myriad.

While I had to be intentional about carving out time for work, training, and exploring, it was a lesson in discipline – and in letting go. When things won't connect, or the café has closed early because you're the only one there, you simply close the laptop and explore.

Food adventures: navigating protein deficits and new flavours

Southeast Asia is a paradise for food lovers, but for someone with an interest in retaining and growing muscle? It’s a challenge. Meals here are carb-heavy, with rice and noodles taking centre stage. I’d order two meals just to hit my protein target, which confused more than a few waitstaff. But, with a few tweaks, I'm glad it never got to the point of weighing my food in a hostel kitchen – having lost 11kg without tracking a single calorie and still building on my target areas, I don't think any non-competitive athlete or bodybuilder needs to document their nutrition with anything other than: am I getting fatter, and how does this food make me feel in terms of energy, digestion, and body composition?

If protein was lacking (despite affordable supplementation with 7-Eleven protein shakes or gym-bought powders), the flavours and textures across Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia were unbelievable and sometimes life-changing. From bun cha in Hanoi to khao soi in Chiang Mai, fish amok in Battambang to beef rendang in Ubud, nearly every meal was an adventure. I can't wait to recreate them in the UK.

Pro tip: build cooking classes into as many trips abroad as you can – the ones we found were inexpensive, often funny, always eye-opening and, given you eat everything you make, super soul-satiating.

Travel logistics: planes, boats, and scooters

Getting around Southeast Asia is as much a story as the destinations themselves. In Vietnam, Beth and I were stuck on a sleeper bus, where beds were clearly designed for people about a foot shorter than me, for nearly 25 hours. In Laos, we came off – thankfully slowly but still scarily – a scooter in sideways rain.

Timetables are for demonstration purposes only. Other than trains, public transport tends to go when there’s enough people to make it viable, which I empathised with given how affordable local buses and boats are for Westerners – think 25p to travel 10km.

Relationships and solo travel

I started this trip solo, and partway through, Beth joined me. Adjusting to travelling together after weeks of independence wasn’t seamless.

We had different rhythms and expectations, which led to bust-ups and hard but necessary truths. But we recalibrated, elicited our goals and wants for both ourselves and us as mates and collaborators, and went on each time to have once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Spying Buddha statues and temples through the clouds of the highest peak in Indochina, swimming with manta rays in Komodo National Park, and stumbling upon a hidden cave with 100 metres of swimmable water with the soft orange lightplay of endless summer sunset at its entrance accompanied by the sweet sounds of a parent and child splashing somewhere downstream are moments we’ll never forget.

Solo travel teaches you resilience, but travelling with someone shows you how to compromise. And while hostel dorms aren’t exactly romantic, they make private rooms feel like luxury suites!

Accommodation: hostels, love them or hate them

Ah, hostels. They’re the lifeblood of budget travel and the bane of light sleepers. I’ve stayed in places where the curtains were more decorative than functional and others where every bunk had its own charging station, reading light, and even a mini fan. But for every great stay, there’s a dorm mate who sets their alarm for 5AM and then snoozes it five times. (To that person: please reconsider your life choices.)

By the end, I’d swapped Hostelworld for Booking.com and prioritised private rooms for better sleep – a non-negotiable when you’re balancing work and training. Hostels offer travel tips over breakfast or hearing someone’s life story during a power outage and reminded me why I love travel in the first place. But whole villas become surprisingly affordable when you travel as two or more and, looking at my budgeting for the past half year or so, I definitely could have indulged my bougie, space-needing side a little more often.

Lessons for the road ahead

These six months weren’t just a break from routine; they were a way of living and an exploration of adaptability. I sweated through subpar gyms, stayed connected across time zones, and re-established that only our education and willingness to think outside of the box limits a cuisine’s efficacy for our goals.

Travelling Southeast Asia didn’t just test my ability to balance work, fitness, and exploration – it showed me that these things aren’t separate. They feed into each other. And as I look ahead to the next adventure, I know I’ll carry these lessons with me – along with some chopsticks, a bag of protein powder, and an ever expanding list of dishes to share with you and yours.

And that’s it from me! My fingers have just about thawed out as I type this and watch the sunrise over the North Yorkshire moors – I’m bloody excited for what’s coming up this year you know.

Much love and I’ll see yas in the next one
Jack x