Hotel Training

Hotel training is filler training — the sessions that keep the practice intact when the conditions won't support progress.

Hotel training is vital. Don’t skip it just because it isn’t “optimal”. Consistency, no matter your level is still the most important ingredient. Most people quit training on the road because they judge a day in a carpeted basement against a day in their own gym. Hotel training is fitness mitigation, not a way to break records.

Travel is already the training stress

Physiologically, you are probably not at your best. You've been compressed in a seat for six hours. You're dehydrated. You've slept badly in a bed that isn't yours, on a schedule that isn't yours, fed by whatever was open. That isn’t to mention a change in time or the deed of jet lag. Your nervous system has been managing low-grade logistical threat since you left the house.

You arrived pre-fatigued. So the session isn't the stress. The session is the correction.

We will all get stuck in a hotel gym at some point. The repetitive patterned carpet. The cubicle feeling. The worst possible machine selection and the overpriced plastic-coated dumbbells that go up to 50 and stop.

There is something to be said for hotel and hostile sharing the same etymology because it is hard to relax despite the vacation”. A hotel is a place built for strangers, a place built for no one in particular, which is why the equipment is chosen the way it is: to offend the fewest people and injure none of them.

And that doesn't mention the crowd. The A-type running an eternity on the only working treadmill. The older woman who has probably never trained before and is using this as ground zero for turning her life around. There's always a 3x10 guy. And for some reason a young couple finding inventive uses for the Swiss ball and a pair of pink 2.5lb dumbbells.

You're not going to fix the room. Set the scenario right and the room stops mattering.

Don’t set expectations. Because you don't know two things, and both of them decide the session.

You don't know what travel did to you. Yesterday's version of you wrote a workout for a body that no longer exists.

And you don't know what's in the room or what's working. The rower with the busted display. The dumbbell rack missing the 40s. One bench, occupied for the next forty minutes.

So don't plan anything until you're standing in it. Walk in, start warming up, and use the warm-up as reconnaissance. Inventory takes ninety seconds: heaviest usable implement, whether any cardio piece works, how much clear floor you actually have, what's likely to free up. Then build.

The session comes out of the room. Not the other way around.

Never plan on going hard. Plan on showing up. Then let the room and the body vote.

You'll be surprised how often the vote comes back “go for it”, and for strange reasons.

The first is that the combinations available to you are simple. A rower, a burpee, and a pair of 50s is a potent combination precisely because there's nothing to think about. Complexity is usually where intensity goes to die.

The second is that I'm still — at least partially — concerned with not being like the crowd I'm standing in. The average person in that room is not training hard. That's all the motivation I need.

There's a bonus. Hard training makes other people uncomfortable. If my breathing is ragged and I'm frothing at the mouth and sweat is pouring across my 5x5 footprint, people tend to remove themselves. At a hotel in Sacramento a guy next to me walking on the treadmill wanted everyone to hear his entire conversation. So I decided to see if I could PR my mile time indoors. When the sweat flung from my arms mid stride and hit his face, he found another place to chat. More room. More options. Making others uncomfortable through their own lack of commitment buys real estate.

Three days max. Unless it's a rarely well-equipped gym, three sessions in a row is the ceiling.

Anything longer and I find a local gym, or I get outside and explore on foot, or I use the stairwell, or the parking structure, a park, a beach or the pool. Something with weather and distance in it.

Longer than three days in a typical hotel gym will break you, and not physically. It's depressing. It flattens motivation and makes the next session harder than it should be. The cost isn't in the training. It's in what you start to believe about training.

What structures should you keep in your head?

Keep a short list of shapes. Then all you have to invent on the spot is the movement and the time domain.

• Ladders. Ascending, descending, or up and back. Two movements, 1 through 10. 3 to 30, Self-scaling and it needs no clock.

• Intervals. :30/:30. 1:1. 3 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy. Works on any machine, working or half-working.

• EMOM. Best structure in a crowded room — you're occupying equipment in predictable bursts, and it caps your own greed.

• Density blocks or AMRAPS. One pair of implements, one movement pair, 12 to 20 minutes, count rounds. That's it.

• Complexes. Single implement, never set it down. The most training you can extract from a limited pair of dumbbells.

• Chippers. One long list, one time through, no rounds. Good when you want volume without decisions.

• Rounds for time with a cardio anchor. Also known as IWTs 10x reps of the heaviest implant you can find then 500m row or 400m run or 60 calories on whatever spins. Rest 2min an repeat for 6 rounds

Constraint is the feature

Most people read the limited equipment as a restriction. It's the most reliable creative tool you have.

Fewer options force workarounds. You go back to bodyweight movements you've neglected. You find variations you haven't touched in a year because the loaded version was always available. You discover that a 50lb dumbbell is heavy if you make it heavy — tempo, unilateral, longer sets, worse leverage, less rest.

A full gym lets you avoid your weaknesses forever, because there's always a machine that lets you avoid them. A bad gym doesn't offer that.

What to pack

Three things, all of them light:

• A jump rope. Solves cardio permanently and takes up four square feet.

• A red band. Turns any anchor point into a pulling station and any doorframe into a shoulder warm-up.

• Headphones. It is already hard enough, you don’t need the patronizing hotel jingles making your session feel like a Cohen Brothers scene.

That's the entire kit. Anything more and you won't bring it.

What not to do

Don't run the session you'd run at home. That's the fastest route to frustration and the most common reason people abandon training on the road. Train before you leave and try to hit movement the moment you land.

Don't test anything. Don't chase a number. Don't do anything that requires a spotter, a good night's sleep, or a good day. 

Training is supposed to serve how you feel, don’t make it reenforce how bad you feel.

And don't apologize for taking up space. You're the only person in the room who came to work.