A comprehensive guide to exercising in your hotel room

You’re traveling and…

Most hotels offer sad examples of fitness centers with half or more of the equipment out of order and the other half hasn’t been cleaned in longer than you’d like to imagine. If you find yourself traveling and it’s cramping your workout style, here are some go-to workouts to do right in your hotel room!

1. Bodyweight Burn: You don’t need any equipment at all to strengthen your muscles, burn calories and fat, and feel great on the go. Try exercises like wall sits, squats, lunges, calf raises, and bridge presses to feel a burn in your lower body. Push ups, chair tricep dips, and punches are perfect for your upper body and planks, crunches, heel digs, and superman lifts will work your entire core. For a perfect total body strength training challenge, choose 10 varied exercises that target your whole body overall. Cycle through sets of 10-20 of each exercise for as many rounds as it takes to complete 100 reps of each exercise. This 1000 rep challenge can be done literally anywhere and is the perfect way to burn your body into shape on the go.

2. Tabatas: You might be working long days, entertaining clients, or busy visiting friends and family while traveling making squeezing a workout in extra difficult. A perfect High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout, tabatas are a handy, supercharged workout when you’re crunched for time. Just 10-20 minutes of HIIT can burn hundreds of calories and ramp up your metabolism for hours. To complete one full round of Tabata, choose a high intensity exercise like burpees, squat jumps, or plyo pushups and perform your exercise of choice at the highest intensity level you can for 20 second intervals with 10 second rest breaks. Once you’ve done this for 8 straight rounds, totaling four minutes, congratulations, you’ve done a Tabata! On paper this workout might seem underwhelming but if you truly work at your highest intensity level, you may not be able to complete that four minutes.

3. Yoga: Perhaps the most beautiful thing about practicing yoga is its travelability. You need absolutely nothing but your mat and the desire to shut off your mind and focus on your practice. If you consider yourself a yogi, you won’t even need instruction, but if you need some guidance to get through your workout, there are tons of apps to choose from or videos online to coach you through. Yoga is the perfect way to unwind from a busy day of travel, stretch out your airplane-cramped muscles, and help ensure that you get restful sleep while you are away from home.

4. Stairs: Not all hotels have stellar workout facilities, but all hotels have stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. Try taking advantage of the abundance of stairs and get a fantastic lower body and cardio workout in. Not only should you challenge yourself to take the stairs instead of the elevator when possible, but for a great hotel workout, try climbing 3 flights of stairs, walking the halls to another staircase, climb 3 more. Do this until you feel a burn in your legs and lungs (or you reach the top) and then make your way back down using the same method. This may not be actually IN your hotel room but you are avoiding that smelly fitness center!

5. Ab Challenge: Few things make you feel better fitness-wise than a burn in your abs. Try an intense ab workout in your hotel room to make you feel fit in a tight space. Starting in a high plank position cycle your way through mountain climbers, plank taps, grave diggers, plank jacks, and alternating plank hip dips for as long as you can stand each exercise with breaks in between. Repeat for up to 5 cycles and you’re sure to be belly-achingly sore in the morning!

Traveling can really put a damper on what might normally be your very regular and reliable fitness regimen. If you find yourself jet-setting but want to keep up your fit style, try these on-the-go workouts that are sure to have you sweating and feeling the burn right in your hotel room.