How To Get A Good Workout At The Hotel
I’ve been staying at a hotel the past couple of days and their fitness center is not quite up to par. Actually, let me be clearer on this, their fitness center is awful! Everything is either broken or about to break, which makes working out there a bit difficult. So I’ve had to improvise a few things in order to get a good workout.
First, The Basics
Never ignore the basics. Crunches, lunges, push ups, squats, calf lifts and so on. These are your bread and butter. They require no weights and can be done anywhere. So yes, you’re lifting less weight because you’re doing body weight excercises, so what? Do more reps and do them slower. You’ll get a great workout.
Second, Improvise
That chair they gave you? That would make a great weight! Just hold it in your hands as your do your squats. Or how about lying on your back and using your suit case as a weight for bench presses? My suit case currently weighs about 80lbs due to some school books I brought with me. That’s perfect for some nice slow sets of 20 bench presses. Remember, a weight is just that, a weight. Anything that you can hold and that has weight can be used as a weight. It doesn’t have to look like a barbell and have a convenient shape in order to qualify as a weight.
Third, Always Be Prepared
There is plenty of workout gear which is portable and light. Resistance bands are one example, a jump rope is another. These are things that fit into any suit case and can be used in a variety of ways. Resistance bands are especially useful.
Fourth, Find The Time
Yes I know, you’re busy on the road. You had a full day of meetings and now you need to answer some email. That’s fine, but you can still find the time to workout. How about a set of exercises between each email? How about a quick workout in the morning and another quick one in the evening? I usually workout late in the evening when I’m traveling, between getting back to the hotel and going out to dinner.
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Last night I did 30 minutes of exercises, most of them with just body weight. Was it a perfect workout? No, but it was good and challenging and that’s all it needed to be.
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Agree with you totally on all of these. If you have 6 feet worth of space, you have a place for push-ups, lunges, crunches, and the like, and the whole world is a gym if you know how to improvise.
I travel quite a bit and my favorite hotel cardio workout, even within hotels which have a good fitness center, is to attack the stairs going up from the bottom to the highest floor, and take the elevator down. I repeat this for 30-50 minutes, depending on how much time I have. This is great interval training in tall, urban hotels of 15 stories or more, and it’s something I can not do back in my rural home.
Don’t forget going outside altogether! Then you can search for places to pull ups and dips, too. You could combine these outside things with using the hotel stairs and the in-room exercises to create a great circuit…
I always do push ups when i’m gone.Good advices.