The Best Workouts (Fast and Efficient) for Traveling and Hotels

The Best Workouts (Fast and Efficient) for Traveling and Hotels

by Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist

In a recent article, I gave you some great ideas for ways to eat healthier while traveling.

Today, I want to show you how easy it is to get short but super effective workouts at home or while traveling (if you happen to be in hotels often for business).

The most frequent excuse I get as to why people don’t workout is PERCEIVED lack of time. I emphasize “perceived” because it is just that… it is a false sense of lack of time.

If your body and health is important to you, there is no such thing as lack of time… you will find a way to incorporate a few minutes here and a few minutes there for full body exercises.

I don’t care how busy you are, how many family or work obligations you have, there are always ways to schedule time for yourself to fit in workouts. For years, I used to work 70-hr+ work-weeks and still always fit in regular workouts at least 3-4x a week.

If you think about it, working out hard for 20 minutes, 5 days per week is only 100 minutes… but realize that you have 10,080 minutes of time in every week, so 100 minutes is only 1% of your given time! When you think about it that way, it’s almost ridiculous not to be able to dedicate 1% of your time to your health and fitness.

Remember I’ve said many times that a good workout doesn’t have to be the traditional 60 minute workout that is so common. It’s all about using the max amount of full body movements with a high enough intensity in any given time period… even if that time period for the workout is only 5 or 10 minutes a day.

Like I mentioned the other day, my good friend Ryan Lee has developed a unique software that even designs super-efficient 4-minute workouts for your specific needs that actually get results… You can see what he’s come up with at…

www.WorkoutRobot.com

Now back to workouts while traveling…

I know that it can be a challenge sometimes if you travel for business to be able to get decent workouts in at some hotels.

Many hotels don’t even have a gym. Some hotels only have a treadmill in a room the size of a broom closet… And other hotels might have a reasonable gym, but a little lacking on equipment.

In any case, there’s still always ways to get in a good workout. Here are a few options:

•Bodyweight exercises — even if the hotel has no gym at all, you can alternate lunges, bw squats, pushups, and ab exercises in your hotel room. Try 15 minutes of alternating circuits between those and if done with enough intensity, this will do the trick to keep you in great shape even while traveling.
•Exercise bands — These can come in handy while traveling because they’re light and portable, and can add a whole slew of exercises into the mix beyond just bodyweight exercises. You can find exercise bands at amazon
•Stairs — most hotels have flights of stairs. You can actually take 10 or 15 minutes to purposely go to the stairs and do nothing but go up/down the stairs to get a great workout… mix up walking/running the stairs, taking double steps… you can even mix in stairs lunges and other similar things for variety.
•Get outside — even if the hotel has a gym, many times it’s small and stuffy. Instead, get outside! It might be possible to find a park or field nearby, and do 20-30 minutes of wind sprints or hill sprints mixed with bodyweight exercises.
•Maybe even bring a jump rope with you and find a smooth surface to jump rope. Jumping rope is one of the best forms of exercise known to man, but so few people actually do it.
•The hotel gym dumbbells — I’ve noticed that a lot of hotels do have a small set of dumbbells, but they usually only go up to a max of 50 lbs. Even if you’re strong enough to use more than 50 lbs for many exercises, this gives you an opportunity to mix up your routines and do versions of dumbbell exercises that maybe you don’t usually do or different rep ranges with slightly lighter weights. One of my favorite dumbbell exercises – the dumbbell squat & press… works almost every muscle in your entire body with this one combination move… a big time fat burner!
Well, I think that’s enough ideas for today… as you can see, there’s no excuse for letting yourself get out of shape just because you travel a lot on business or have a perceived lack of time.

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Fat Loss Workouts That Are Better Than Cardio Exercise

Despite common belief by fitness enthusiasts, cardio workouts are NOT effective for fat loss or losing weight long term.

by Craig Ballantyne, Men’s Health Fitness Advisor, Expert Fitness Author – Beyond Cardio Workouts .com

One of the most frustrating sights in the world is watching men and women do the same so-called “fat loss cardio workouts” for months and months without results. It happens more often than it should. In fact, there’s rarely anyone in most gyms who is able to lose weight with long, slow cardio.

Even research from the scientific journal, “Obesity” showed that even when men and women do up to 300 hours of cardio exercise per year, they only lose 4-6 pounds of weight. That just isn’t worth it! No one has time to do 50 hours of cardio in order to lose one pound of weight.

That’s why you need fat loss workouts that are better than cardio. Research and experience proves that interval training (and even high intensity weight training) is better for burning belly fat than long, slow cardio. Plus, interval training workouts are fun, fast, and more enjoyable. You’ll save time, lose more weight, and build a fit, functional body with these fat loss workouts.

Cardio exercise machines are NOT optimal, but if you must…

First, if you are stuck exercising inside a commercial gym for your workout, you can use traditional cardio machines for interval training.

An easy to do interval training program is to do a 5-minute warm-up followed by six intervals of 30-60 seconds of hard exercise, alternated with 60 seconds of easy exercise. Then you cool down for 5 minutes and you’re done. That’s less than half the time that most people spend on machines doing long, slow cardio.

After a warm-up, do a one minute “work interval” where you will exercise harder than normal cardio. After one minute, decrease the intensity all the way down to a cool-down level for one minute. Repeat the hard-easy combo up to 6 times and then finish with a cool down. That is the simplest way to do interval training.

If you normally run at 6 miles per hour on the treadmill for 30 minutes, you can do your first interval workout by running at 7 miles per hour for 1 minute and then walking at 3.5 miles per hour for 2 minutes. That’s a conservative place to start with interval training. You’d repeat that “hard-easy” protocol 6 times in an interval training workout (after a warm-up and followed by a cool-down).

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The best cardio machines (if you must use indoor cardio machines) for fast interval training fat loss workouts are the treadmill and stationary cycle. Rowing machines and elliptical (cross-trainers) are ok, but in my experience, the treadmill and bike are best.

Best Alternative Workouts to Traditional Cardio Exercise

Most people enjoy getting out of the gym or doing alternative fat loss interval training workouts (instead of boring cardio workouts inside a stuffy gym). You can use a kettlebell, your bodyweight, a skipping rope, or medicine ball for interval workouts in just a small space in your home or garage. You don’t need to go to a big, fancy, expensive commercial gym to burn fat or get long term weight loss success.

Plus, it’s easier to experiment with different interval training workout programs when you don’t have to deal with intensity settings on cardio machines. After all, it’s next to impossible to do the popular Tabata interval workouts on a treadmill, bike, or elliptical machine.

In the Tabata intervals, you work hard for 20 seconds and then recover for 10 seconds, and you repeat that 8 times. That makes for a fast and effective 4-minute tabata workout, not including warm-up and cool-down. You just can’t do that on a cardio machine, but it works perfectly for kettlebells and medicine ball exercises, as well as bodyweight circuits.

Bodyweight training is the most underappreciated fat loss workout option. Most folks are drawn to fancy equipment, but mostly because the equipment often makes the workout easier. Moving your own bodyweight is tough, and keeps you honest!

In the Turbulence Training bodyweight cardio circuits, you’ll use 6-8 bodyweight exercises, alternating between a lower body exercise and an upper body exercise, before finishing the circuit with a fast total body exercise such as running in place, burpees, or jumps.

In the circuits, you’ll do 6-20 repetitions per exercise depending on your fitness level. Once you complete the circuit, rest for one minute, and then repeat the circuit 1-3 more times. If you are new to bodyweight circuits, just do two total circuits.

The great news is that in most cases, you don’t need a single piece of equipment to do these fat burning bodyweight workouts, so you can do them in a hotel room, your garage, or even in front of the TV.

Now you have lots of fun, fast, effective fat loss workouts that are better than cardio!

>> Click here to download the Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean Body free ebook

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