My Two Favorite Hotel Gym Workout

Over the years, I have spent as many as 200 days on the road in a single rotation around the sun. Although I don’t travel that much these days, I’m still boarding planes a few times a month. With that comes staying in plenty of hotels and using their gyms. Some of the hotels have gorgeous gyms: floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking a cityscape; others may have only one broken treadmill, a stationary bike, and resistance systems with dangling pulley cords. This “gym” is often jammed into what may have once been a rental suite in the basement. I’ve stayed in my fair share of the two extremes!

Routinely disappointed by the facilities I was never one to give the hotel gym the benefit of the doubt. I began to tailor my on-the-road workout regime to the hotel room or a sparse gym with nothing but a bike or a treadmill.

Over time, I found that no matter how great the hotel gym may be, with the jet lag or busyness of a being on the road, I preferred the simplicity of two workouts above all others. One you can find here and the other is below.

Pre-Workout Warm-Up

• Warm up until you feel loose

• Skipping, drills, or dynamic stretching (it’s up to you). Head and arm circle rotations, etc.

• Adding a weighted vest/backpack or resistance bands will dramatically increase intensity (burpees with weight vests are the best!)

Workout

• 8-minute run

• Circuit

  • 5-6 x 10 pushups

  • 5-6 x 15 full sit-ups

  • 5-6 x 10 pull-ups

• 40 burpees

• Bike – 20 mins. hard

• 8-minute run

Modification: You can break up the run & bike into 2- & 4-minute intervals respectively, and spread them throughout your circuit.

That’s it. If you close this workout with a hot & cold shower, or just a cold shower, you’ll crush any jet lag (for a while at least), and own whatever you get up to on your day on the road.