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

by Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author of best-seller:  The Truth about Six Pack Abs & The Top 101 Foods that FIGHT Aging

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.

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.
Ryan Lee's software below even shows you how to combine strategic exercises into effective workouts in as little as 4-minutes per workout... you can choose to do these 4-minute workouts once, twice, or even more per day depending on your preferences:

Til next ezine issue,
Don't be lazy... be lean. Mike Geary
Certified Nutrition Specialist
Certified Personal Trainer
Founder - TruthAboutAbs.com