Fitness Inventor

How to get a good workout at a hotel while on the road

Okay, many of us have been there: You find yourself staying at a low-end hotel, you go down to the gym, and all that’s there is a broken spinning bike from 1976, covered in rust and cobwebs, and a padded decline ab cruncher—or worse, no gym at all! So what do you do? Go catabolic?

Well, although it is a challenge to get an effective workout without dumbbells that go all the way up to 200 pounds and the latest machines from Hammer Strength, it can be done! So let me demonstrate how to hit legs on the road! I don’t know about you, but when I travel, I almost always have a knapsack. Mine happens to be fairly big and can handle a good deal of weight. You probably know where I’m going with this as a means to add resistance in the absence of iron. If you don’t have anything particularly heavy to put in your knapsack, you have to get creative. A great place to start is with the overpriced 1.5-litre bottles of water that they have on offer; water is pretty heavy. If the water plus the heaviest items you brought with you still aren’t that heavy, you may have to buy some water at the local convenience store or go to the lobby and find some books or other heavy items that you can “borrow.”

Once you’ve found the right resistance, the key to really jacking up the intensity in this scenario is exercise order. So to start, find the longest stretch of straight hallway on your floor and warm up by doing walking lunges from one end to the other, and then when you reach the end, do 20 deep squats, lunge back to where you started and do 20 more squats, without rest … that’s one set. Now do one more set, a quick stretch, and then throw the knapsack on and hit it at least three more times (up to 10 or more sets total). If the hallway is short or you aren’t breathing really heavily, then extend the length of the lunges so that you’re going to the end of the hallway and back; I’d want to do 40 lunges (20 each leg). Rest just long enough between sets to get your breathing just about back to normal (this sets the intensity in line with your relative abilities). Quads and glutes done!

Okay, hamstrings: With one leg almost straight and the other bent and toes resting several inches back on the floor or behind you on a chair and keeping your chin up and your lower back straight, bend forward with your arms hanging down in front of you as far as you can go without arching your back and come back up (think “one-legged Romanian deadlift”). Do 20 to 30 reps with each leg; these may feel harder than they sound! Do at least three sets. However, if you’ve been doing your hamstring homework and need more resistance, it’s time to get the knapsack back out and you can hang onto it as your resistance.

By now, if you’ve done enough sets and taken appropriately short breaks to max the intensity, this will have been a challenging workout that has hit all of the major muscles of the upper leg, so it’s time for calves. This is an easy one. Find the stairs, start off with 50 reps with the balls of your feet on the edge of a stair, grasping the railing lightly for balance. Then do a quick stretch and alternate single-leg calf raises, starting at 30 reps each, then 25, then 20, and so on, with no rest between legs. If you’re still going strong when you get to 5 reps per leg, then I hope you brought your knapsack; throw it on and do another 3 sets of 10 reps per leg.

A word of caution: Some people may mistakenly think that this is just a “maintenance” workout, but if you’ve adjusted appropriately and taken short rests, you can expect some DOMS tomorrow—not least of all because this will have been an unaccustomed workout with regard to order of exercise, rests, and rep range!